Cong brass pleads for aam aadmi

The Congress brass has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to keep the focus on aam aadmi (common man) during the coming Union Budget, to be presented later this month.

At a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) today, party president Sonia Gandhi asked her colleagues to give suggestions on the coming Budget as the finance minister took a pen and a notebook to write these down.

According to General-Secretary Janardhan Dwivedi, who is also the party’s chief spokesperson, “none of the members gave any specific suggestions but all of them said the Budget should keep in mind the common man. They also said that last year’s Budget was good and the coming Budget should follow the same path.”

Singh later said UPA’s programmes for the poor and the downtrodden had started showing results and the government would continue to work for the uplift of the vulnerable section of the society.

Besides Budget and the price rise, the CWC meeting also spent time on the volatile issue of Telangana statehood with Home Minister P Chidambaram reporting on the developments that took place during the past few months.