PM Modi and P Chidambaram
NEW DELHI: Congress veteran and ex-Union finance minister P Chidambaram on Sunday argued that “economic metric will always be higher than in the previous years,” as he responded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s statement that the current National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre allocated more funds to Tamil Nadu than the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration.
“Hon’ble PM and Central ministers constantly say that they have given more money to TN in 2014-24 than was given in 2004-14. For example, Hon’ble PM said that his government has given for railway projects in TN seven times more money than before. Ask a first year student of economics. She will tell you that the ‘economic metric’ will always be higher than in the previous years,” Chidambaram, who is from Tamil Nadu and whose party is an ally of the state’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), posted on X.
“The GDP’s size is bigger now than before. The size of the central Budget is bigger every year than in the previous year. Government’s total expenditure is bigger every year than in the previous year. You are one year older than in the previous year. In terms of ‘numbers’, the number will be bigger, but is it higher in teems of proportion of GDP or in terms of proportion of total expenditure?,” he added.
Earlier, PM Modi, without mentioning Tamil Nadu chief minister and DMK boss MK Stalin, called out people who “cry without any reason.”
“Tamil Nadu has a very big role in the journey of a developed India. I believe the stronger Tamil Nadu becomes, the faster India will grow. In the last decade, the central government has allocated three times more money for the development of Tamil Nadu than in 2014,” the prime minister said while inaugurating the new Pamban Bridge in Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram.
“Despite this, some people have the habit of crying without any reason; they keep crying. Before 2014, only Rs 900 crore was received every year for the railway project. This year, Tamil Nadu’s railway budget is more than Rs 6,000 crore, and the Government of India is also modernizing 77 railway stations here,” he further stated.
Stalin has repeatedly accused the NDA government of “neglecting and betraying” the southern state by not releasing the required funds, stating that the Centre could not accept the fact that the state was growing.
BJP responds to P Chidambaram
BJP national spokesperson Amit Malviya called Chidambaram a “self-styled oracle of selective economics” and accused him of criticizing the Modi government for pointing to a “plainly evident” fact.
“His counter? A smug lecture on GDP and absolute numbers, as though that somehow absolves his party of its poor governance record. Any first-year economics student knows that the Debt-to-GDP ratio is the standard for assessing a country’s debt burden. Is this sheer hypocrisy, or simply proof that your party struggles with the fundamentals of fiscal policy? Or maybe it’s even simpler: perhaps the Congress party’s collective economic IQ mirrors that of its de facto leader—a man whose strategic “brilliance” is better known for turning everything he touches into a fiasco,” Malviya posted, apparently referring to Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and ex-Congress chief.