The Congress party on Thursday launched an online campaign to attack the government over handling of the Covid-19 situation. The central theme of the party’s campaign is unemployment; it has alleged that job loss increased due to mishandling of the pandemic by the government.
A host of Congress leaders, including former party president Rahul Gandhi and general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, tweeted with the hashtag #SpeakUpForJobs asking people to “speak for the country’s future”.
“The policies of Modi Govt have caused the loss of crores of jobs and a historic fall in GDP. It has crushed the future of India’s youth. Let’s make the Govt listen to their voice,” Rahul Gandhi said in his tweet.
It was followed by tweets from the Congress party. “Lakhs of Indians are losing jobs everyday, whether it was in locked down India or unlocked India. All BJP does is silently watch on. The Nation will not stay silent, the Nation will #SpeakUpForJobs,” it said in one of the tweets.
India saw its economy contract by 23.9 per cent in the June quarter – the steepest fall in four decades. It was the worst performance among G20 nations, and significantly below expectations of most economists, as the stringent Covid-19-induced national lockdown created a double-whammy through both a supply and demand side shock.
Businesses shut operations while consumers were forced to stay home.
“Jobs are undre stress due to increasing privatisation, cut in governemnt expenses and bad economic policies of the BJP government. The government has stopped hiring for existing vacancies. We will have to speak up for the future of this country,” Priyanka Gandhi Vadra tweeted in Hindi.
Goldman Sachs and Fitch Ratings on Tuesday forecast deeper-than-previously estimated economic recession for India in FY21 holding that limited fiscal support, fragilities in the financial system and a continued rise in coronavirus cases are hampering a rapid normalisation in economic activity.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs anticipates India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to shrink 14.8% this fiscal against its earlier estimate of an 11.8% contraction.
