BJP National Spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill has stated that he stands vindicated on his concerns about the poor fiscal health of Punjab under the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) regime led by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann. In a statement issued here on Thursday, Shergill said that his repeated concerns have been proved correct with the government admitting to having taken a loan of Rs 50,000 crore during its short tenure of just over one and half years.
He said, “It would be an understatement to say that Punjab’s economy is in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) gasping for breath on a ventilator. It is the AAP government’s wrong policies and economic mismanagement that is squarely responsible for the prevailing scenario,” the BJP leader said.
Referring to the letter written by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to Punjab Governor Banwarilal Purohit, Shergill said, “In the letter, Mann had himself admitted that the financial position of the State is strained. Furthermore, the details of the utilization of loan mentioned in the letter clearly stated that the AAP government has contributed Rs 47,107.6 crore to the state debt in the past one-and-a-half years.”
“This completely belies the claims of the Mann government that the state’s economy is in the pink of health. It rather establishes that the economy is in doldrums,” Shergill underlined. BJP Spokesperson said that the AAP government is completely visionless and clueless, which is evident from the fact that even the budget for the fiscal year 2023-24 lacked any new avenues of enhancing revenue collection even though immediate steps were required to be taken to address the problem of ever-worsening financial crisis in the state.
“In reality, the government has no vision to create resources for revenue generation so that the state could be brought out of the red. It remains entrenched in the vicious debt trap,” Shergill asserted. Quoting some statistics, Shergill said that at the end of the financial year 2021-22 Punjab had a debt of Rs 2.82 lakh crore which increased to Rs 3.12 lakh crore at the end of fiscal year 2022-23. The debt is projected to touch a new high of Rs 3.47 lakh crore by the end of fiscal year 2023-24.
Shergill further said that the Punjab government has also sought a moratorium of five years on repayment of debt. “This clearly exposes the government's claims that coffers are not empty. Interestingly, some ten months back, the government had out rightly rejected the idea of a moratorium but now the very same government has taken a complete U-turn on the matter,” he added.
Asserting that the AAP government has no roadmap or blueprint to make the state debt-free, Shergill said, “The people of Punjab had high hopes but the AAP government has miserably failed to bail out the state from the burgeoning debt and revive the dwindling economy.” Shergill further pointed out that Punjab is among the most indebted states in the country and the present dispensation has put the state’s economy in the reverse gear.
The BJP spokesperson added, “At times, the AAP government even finds it difficult to pay the salaries to the employees on time. But unfortunately, despite the fact that the state economy is bleeding, the AAP dispensation is indulging in wasteful expenditure by spending crores on advertisements and hoardings publicizing the government’s fake achievements.”