The Congress chief’s magic wand for jobs is requested to state government when the party is in power in only 5 states out of 29. Congress government left the same job mess in 2014 that he promises to fill, passing the blame on to BJP.
New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday released their election manifesto for 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but once again chief Rahul Gandhi seems to have got lost in the maze of numbers when it came to promising jobs.
While Gandhi declared in the very beginning of the manifesto that he does not break a promise — “I’ve never broken a promise that I’ve made” — he seems to have lost track of all that he had promised before releasing the manifesto.
Picking from the latest in his series of jibes at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Gandhi had claimed that in 2018 one crore jobs vanished from India. He was speaking on March 20 at Imphal.
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But, his manifesto promises to fill four lakh vacancies in Central government departments and CPSUs. He promises to fill them in the same period, till March 2020.
Perhaps, Gandhi forgot that these vacancies are his own creation and that of Congress’ 10-year-long rule, from 2004 to 2014.
According to reports of the Seventh Pay Commission, the Congress government, while it demitted office in 2014, left a gaping hole of 19% shortage of personnel as recorded on January 1, 2014.
In January 2014, 56 ministries and departments were suffering a staff crunch of nearly 7,28,870 according to the report. Of the nearly 3,890,112 sanctioned strength, only 3,161,242 had been filled.
The UPA-2 saddled the BJP government with a gap of nearly 7.5 lakh vacancies.
Of these vacancies, according to a Finance Ministry report, only around four lakh vacancies were left on March 1, 2016.
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