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UPA government must go: Venkaiah

Special Correspondent

BANGALORE: Bharatiya Janata Party senior leader M. Venkaiah Naidu on Friday said the sooner the UPA government goes and early elections are held for the Lok Sabha the better.

“The government at the Centre is paralysed as the UPA partners are not able to work together, but at the same time all of them are scared of facing the polls,” Mr. Naidu told journalists here.

Accusing the government of failure on all fronts, he said: “The UPA should either govern or get out.”

Observing that the meetings between the UPA and the Left parties on the nuclear deal had not yielded the desired results, he said: “They meet only to decide the dates for the next meeting.” He said this kind of a paralytic government is not good for the country. Mr. Naidu said there was only half truth in the UPA’s argument that “huge rise in petrol and food prices is responsible for the rise in inflation and that it is a global phenomenon.”

The European countries have been able to keep inflation under control though they are not producing oil, he said.

Disputing the claims that high inflation rate was a global phenomenon, Mr. Naidu pointed out that the inflation rate in Japan was only 0.8 per cent, Canada 1.7 per cent and Italy 3.6 per cent while it was 3 per cent in Malaysia, Britain, France and Germany.

“If these countries have been able to control inflation, why India has failed,” he wondered.

He alleged that the economy had crumbled during the UPA rule and production had come down in all sectors. The agriculture sector was facing the worst-ever crisis in the post-Independence regime.

Even the loan-waiver scheme announced by the government cannot address the farmers’ problems as the quantum of funds allocated for it was too meagre, he said.

Mr. Naidu squarely blamed the Centre for the shortage in fertilizers. He said it was a result of lack of foresight and proper planning on the part of the Centre. The UPA’s failure to announce pricing and freight policy with respect to the fertilizers was the main reason for the shortage.

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