Skip to main content

Gujarat third most indebted State: Anand Sharma

The UPA Government on Tuesday launched an attack on the “Gujarat economic model”, with Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma saying that though BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi takes credit for Gujarat's pro-investments image, it is in fact the third most indebted State. “Nearly Rs 1.38 trillion is the debt of the State,” Mr. Sharma said.

Latest Reserve Bank data on State indebtedness released in Janaury, however, shows that Gujarat has in fact outperformed the target set by the Thirteenth Finance Commission (TFC) for it on the crucial parameter of debt as a percentage of the gross state domestic product (GSDP). Against the TFC target of 27.6 per cent, Gujarat achieved a debt-GSDP ratio of 23.2. It ranks ninth on the non-special category States list on the parameter.

Addressing a press conference here, Mr. Sharma further said that Mr. Modi's economic vision for India was nothing but “political plagiarism” and only a rehash of the UPA Government's achievements.

The Minister also alleged that the investment figures announced by the Gujarat Chief Minister during Vibrant Gujarat Summits were “exaggerated”. “Perhaps Modi is not familiar with (the current figures).The numbers are there in the record,” Mr. Sharma said.

Mr. Sharma said that the Reserve Bank's data shows that Gujarat received $9 bn in Foreign DirectInvestments (FDI) between April, 2000 and December 2013, adding that Maharashtra received the highest FDI during the said period ($65 billion), followed by Delhi ($38.8 bn) and Chennai ($12.6 bn). The official spokesperson of the Reserve Bank, however, told The Hindu on email that it does not publish states-wise data on FDI. Till the time of going to print, Mr. Sharma's office did not provide to The Hindu the source of the data quoted by the Minister at the press conference.

Earlier, Mr. Sharma had said that Mr. Modi had claimed in 2011 that during the Vibrant Gujarat summitthat the state inked FDI agreements worth $450 bn.“Just add it (the numbers). This is a multiple of at least five or six times of India's total FDI. The total FDI received by India is $296 billion so far,” he added.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

High dose of Vitamin C and B3 can kill colon cancer cells: study (downtoearth)

In a first, a team of researchers has found that high doses of Vitamin C and niacin or Vitamin B3 can kill cancer stem cells. A study published in Cell Biology International showed the opposing effects of low and high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B3 on colon cancer stem cells. Led by Bipasha Bose and Sudheer Shenoy, the team found that while low doses (5-25 micromolar) of Vitamin C and B3 proliferate colon cancer stem cells, high doses (100 to 1,000 micromolar) killed cancer stem cells. Such high doses of vitamins can only be achieved through intravenous injections in colon cancer patients. The third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer can be prevented by an intake of dietary fibre and lifestyle changes. While the next step of the researchers is to delineate the mechanisms involved in such opposing effects, they also hope to establish a therapeutic dose of Vitamin C and B3 for colon cancer stem cell therapy. “If the therapeutic dose gets validated under in vivo...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »