Hypocrisy
On the recent deregulation of petrol prices, the PM had this to say:
““People are wise enough to understand that excessive populism should not be allowed to derail the progress our country is making”
This coming from a PM whose Government is running a 50k crore NREGS scheme and has waived off 70k crores in farm loans, amongst other things.
I’m all for deregulation of fuel prices but this should have been accompanied by a decrease in the ridiculous Rs. 14+ excise duty and Rs. 7.5+ sales tax that the Government collects on petrol. Given that the burden of issuing oil bonds would reduce (or go away completely) with this deregulation, the tax burden should be reduced too. But of course, that is not going to happen for who will then finance their profligate populist schemes that they use to buy their precious votes at the polling booth.
Absolutely Right !!!