Sidhu attacks central schemes, calls them failure

New Delhi, May 6 (IANS) Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu on Monday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the central government over what he called were their "failed policies".

In an about hour-long press conference, Sidhu claimed that most of the central government's schemes have failed to attract success and have been a failure.

Sidhu alleged that schemes like MUDRA have been unable to help the youth as the average loan sanctioned in the scheme was only Rs 46,000. According to him, an RTI information had revealed that barely 1 per cent of applications were able to receive loan above Rs 5 lakh.

"Mudhra yojana, which Modiji claims has helped the youth to set up businesses, has been a big failure as only 1 per cent of the applications could receive loans above Rs 5 lakh. The average loan amount has also been very low," said Sidhu.

The Skill India, which Modi promoted, had almost 40 per cent ghost entries, he said.

Moreover, he claimed that the central government could not manage to fulfil the target of 40 crore trainees by 2020 and had only been able to train 41 lakh people our of which only 6 lakh had got jobs.

"We believe that 40 per cent of the entries in these centres were ghost (entries) and this requires an investigation."

Referring to the Supreme Court's observation, Sidhu highlighted that the central government had been cleaning the river Ganga at a very slow pace and the scheme had got only Rs 6,000 crore of the planned Rs 20,000 crore.

"It was the Supreme court's observation that the rate at which the government is cleaning the Ganga it would take 200 years to make Ganga clean again," Sidhu said.

At the press conference, Sam Pitroda also criticized the Prime Minister for his remarks on late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

"How can someone who comes from Gujarat, where Mahatma Gandhi came from, speak such things? It shows Modi has gone into a panic mode and knows that he is going to lose (the elections)," Pitroda said.