Manufacturing Sector In Lot Of Trouble: AAP’s Priyanka Kakkar Raises Questions Over PM Modi’s Make In India Scheme

Kakkar claimed that the Make In India scheme launched in 2014 with 2 goals, namely to increase the manufacturing sector's contribution to 25 per cent of GDP by 2022, and generate 10 crore jobs

Aam Aadmi Party Spokesperson, Priyanka Kakkar, on Tuesday, raised questions over the credibility of economic reform claims made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Addressing the media, the spokesperson held the Narendra Modi government responsible for the fall of the manufacturing sector in the country. 

She claimed that the Make In India scheme launched by the Modi government in 2014 had two goals, namely the manufacturing sector to contribute 25 per cent to the GDP by 2022, and to generate 10 crore manufacturing jobs by that time. However, she added, “The manufacturing sector contributed 17 per cent to the GDP in 2014, however, it declined to 13.6 per cent in 2019, before the COVID pandemic.” She claimed that this contribution further fell to 13.32 per cent in 2022.

The politician stated, “In our country, manufacturing is in a lot of trouble as it is continuously declining,” citing her claims on the data shared by the World Bank. When the PM was questioned about the manufacturing figures in 2018, he had replied that ‘Frying pakodas (fritters) is also employment, which is not included in these figures’, Kakkar claimed. 

“Forget generating 10 crore manufacturing job opportunities, the country today is going through the worst levels of unemployment seen in the last 5 decades,” Kakkar said. 

In 2020, the Modi government also launched the ‘Performance Linked Incentive Scheme’, which claimed that domestic manufacturers in the country would benefit from subsidies from the government, the AAP representative noted. “This was a lie, because according to WTO rules, PLI cannot be given in India based on manufacturing, but only on assembly…Their PLI scheme also failed badly,” she said.

Further, Kakkar said that in 2022, FinMin Nirmala Sitharaman stated that the government provided PLI to the manufacturers. The AAP spokesperson claimed that this was a lie because of the WTO rules, which allow for PLI to be disbursed only on assembling, rather than manufacturing. 

Kakkar added that unlike the claim made by Sitharaman that foreign direct investment (FDI) has been consistently increasing in the country, from 2004 to 2014, FDI stood at 2.4 per cent, while today it stands at 1.7 per cent. 

While Kakkar admitted that Sitharaman’s claims about reducing the corporate tax were true, it, however, applies only to 0.001 per cent of the businessmen in the country, she stated. “AAP wants to tell them to firstly stop lying and talk about the solution,” she said. 

“MSMEs are considered the backbone of the manufacturing industry in the country. Still, the BJP government has frequently ignored the MSMEs. They soiled the environment so much that today, businessmen are afraid of employing any Muslim or Dalit individuals. In the last 10 years, 16 lakh Indians have left their citizenship and escaped from the country. 23,000 high-net-worth individuals have closed their businesses and left the country. MSMEs are dying, which is very dangerous for the country,” Kakkar claimed. 

Further, she noted that the tax regime for the MSMEs has been made so complicated that they are either shutting their businesses or downscaling them.