PM selling crown jewels of country: Rahul Gandhi over NMP plan

New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi hit out at the Modi regime on Tuesday over its National Infrastructure Monetisation (NMP) plan, alleging that the Centre was in the process of ”selling India’s crown jewels” built by previous governments over the past seven decades.

He also repeated his charge that the BJP-led government was doing this policy push as part of its plot “to benefit a few of its industrialist friends” and warned the people, the youth and also the workers and employees of the infrastructure firms that they would suffer heavily due to the NMP.

“The Narendra Modi-led government is in the process of selling India’s crown jewels built by previous governments with public money over 70 years. I want to tell the youth what the country is selling and which asset is going to whom,” Gandhi said at a press conference.

He read out “examples of sales” such as “Rs 1.6 lakh crore for 26,700 kilometres of national highways”, “railways for Rs 1.5 lakh crore with 400 stations 150 trains, railway tracks”, “Rs 25,000 crores for 8,000 kilometres of GAIL pipeline”.

Gandhi went on to present a comparative difference with the UPA’s “privatisation policy”. “We are not against privatisation but our privatisation plan had a logic. We (UPA regime ) didn’t privatise strategic industries and we consider railways a strategic industry because it transports lakhs and crores of people and also employs lots of people,” he said. “We privatised chronically loss-making industries. We privatised the companies that had minimal market share. We didn't privatise government enterprises with the potential of checking private sector monopoly in a particular sector.” He further said, “There is an excuse they (Centre) have come up with, that ‘we are leasing these’.” Attributing the NAM to economic mismanagement, he said, ‘ They have basically destroyed what the UPA built and now as a last resort, they are selling everything.”

Former finance minister P Chidambaram wondered how the Centre could proceed with such a plan without taking the stakeholders, including the employees’ unions, into confidence.