Sharad Pawar, the Congress Lok Sabha floor leader, manoeuvred to take control of deciding the partys stands on issues in the budget session. The stands are to be discussed at a meeting of the Congress Party in Parliament at his residence on Thursday.
Pawar has asked socialist party leaders Sanat Mehta and Sriballabh Panigrahi to make presentations at the meeting on rising prices and labour respectively. Pawars supporters have recently signalled a distance from the partys official economic policy, charted by former finance minister Manmohan Singh.
Pawar had taken the initiative to invite senior members for the strategy session, telling them they would be briefed by experts. His invitation mentioned that party chief Sitaram Kesari would attend. It did not say who would preside. Kesari evidently decided to turn the meeting into a regular executive meeting, to avoid the impression that Pawar was an independent power centre. Kesari will no doubt take the chair.
CPP secretary Prithviraj Chauhan announced that yesterdays executive meetings discussions would continue at another meeting on Thursday. He added that the meeting would take place at Pawars residence and that experts would make presentations.
Whoever presides, Pawar has already listed the eight issues to be discussed. Chauhan said they include rising prices, the Prasar Bharati bill, coal sector privatisation, the pay commissions report, fertiliser prices, Bofors, nuclear policy, Pakistan and the likely income tax on farmers.
Mehta, whom Pawar has asked to speak on rising prices, is a former finance minister of Gujarat. He had criticised the Rao governments economic policies in a paper he presented to the previous CPP meeting. In it, he listed rising prices at the head of a list of problems that remained at the end the first five years of liberalisation.
The other points he listed were: almost unaffected rate of unemployment, low rate of human resources development index, deteriorating evnironmental conditions in industrial areas, low investment in infrastructure (both rural and general), rising rate of inflation.
The paper obliquely argues against increasing the prices of petroleum prices: Rise in prices of primary (food) produce and similar rise in crude and petroleum products had contributed to the rise in rate of inflation, which is approaching double digit.
On unemployment, it says the rural male worker current daily status unemployment rate-measuring disposition of labour time has gone up from 4.55 per cent in 1987-88 to 5.64 per cent in 1993-94. This indicates increase of 23 per cent. This shows that New Economic Policy has not made dent in rural areas.
