Virendra Singh Rawat / Lucknow
Senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Sunday accused Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath of plunging the state into a financial mess.
Talking to newspersons here, Chidambaram said the Gross Social Domestic Product (GSDP) growth rate of UP had declined from 11.4 percent in 2016-17 to (-) 6.4 percent in 2020-21.
“The total public debt has breached Rs 6.62 trillion, which is 34.4 percent of the GSDP. About 40 percent of the current debt was added during the Yogi government,” he said.
He observed the UP government helmed by Yogi had “no knowledge, concern and understanding” of the economic landscape.
“My understanding of Yogi is that he is a simple person with zero understanding of economics. His government is just going on borrowing funds without increasing the GSDP in the same ratio, which is why the public debt is rising sharply,” he noted.
He lamented despite being the country’s most populous state and giving eight prime ministers, including Narendra Modi, UP lagged on most of the key socioeconomic indicators, including health, jobs, medical facilities, education etc.
He said the per capita income of UP was less than half of India’s average and under the Yogi government, it had declined by 1.9 percent.
Citing Niti Aayog statistics, he claimed nearly 38 percent of UP’s population was poor, while 12 and 3 districts had 50 percent and 70 percent of their population respectively as poverty stricken.
“The youth of UP is among the worst affected due to high unemployment rate, which is nearly double the all India average. Nearly 1/8th of the state’s youth is unemployed and 12.32 million youth have to migrate to other states for jobs,” Chidambaram added.
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UP has a shortfall of 277,000 teachers while the state has the country’s worst pupil-teacher ratio and highest student dropout ratio too.