India opposition leader pledges to end poverty by 2030

Bloomberg

India’s main opposition Congress party has pledged to tackle unemployment and poverty as it seeks to wrest power from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling coalition just days out from a national election.
Led by Rahul Gandhi, the party released its election manifesto in New Delhi, promising to rid India of poverty by 2030, waive farm loans, introduce a single sales tax and reserve a third of government jobs for women.
It repeated a commitment, announced last week, to provide 20 percent of poor families across the country with a payment of 72,000 rupees ($1,046) annually through their bank accounts to ensure their basic income does not fall below $174 per month.
With joblessness at a 45-year high of 6.1 percent, Gandhi pledged to fill 400,000 posts at a federal level and urge state governments to fill 2 million vacant jobs by the end of March 2020.
“Unemployment is the gravest challenge to the country and job creation is the highest concern for the economy,” the party’s manifesto reads.
“In the last five years there’s been a dramatic rise in unemployment.”
The manifesto should make an impact, said Sudha Pai, a political science professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “It’s certainly a very progressive document,” she said. “The income support programme seems doable and more plausible than anything the Modi government has put forward in the budget. But the main problem will be the implementation, especially in India’s corrupt northern states.”
India’s general elections will take place in seven phases between April 11 and May 19, with results to be announced on May 23.

Economic Expansion
Congress said it would revive the economy by giving a push to private investment, government expenditure, domestic consumption and exports.
It proposed to increase the share of India’s manufacturing from 16 percent of GDP to 25 percent in five years. Even with all its expenditure plans, the party aims to achieve 3 percent budget gap goal by 2021.
It plans to merge state-run banks and “promises to reverse the unwarranted and illegal interference by the BJP government into the functioning of the RBI.” Businesses that employ a certain percentage of women workers will get incentives if the Congress party assumed power after the polls, it said.

Farmer Focus
The farm loan waiver is one of India’s most popular, often-used political tools.
In 2009, it helped Manmohan Singh’s Congress-led government return to power with a bailout programme in which 37 million farmers benefited from waivers of 522 billion rupees.
This time, the party’s pledged to waive outstanding farm loans across the country, as it did when it formed government in the states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in December.
“If a farmer can’t repay debt it would be civil offence not criminal offence,” Gandhi said, committing to creating a separate budget for farmers if elected
to office.