eng
competition

Text Practice Mode

Exercise 523

created Mar 15th, 15:28 by Seema Bana


2


Rating

816 words
10 completed
00:00
Sir, what I am saying is that economic policies today should be radically changed. I was shocked, and we were shocked, by the advocacy in favour of Monopoly capitalism. No wonder Mr. J.R.D. Tata, Mr. K.K. Birla, and others are making statements acclaiming your economic policies. They are, on the one hand, applauding you, helping you in many ways, and on the other hand, they are also helping the counterrevolutionary forces. This is the technique of the Monopoly Capital prevailing today. They have two strings to their bow. They want to build forces in the opposition and build forces within the Government so that in the bargain, it is they who gain and the nation suffers. That is what is happening. I should like, in this connection, to dispute what the Finance Minister said by his economic jugglery. No amount of economic jugglery will hide the facts of life. Your annual report of the Reserve Bank of India shows that stagnation in the agricultural economy has taken place, and it also tells us why this stagnation is happening. Stagnation is taking place because the richer sections in the agricultural economy, having kept all the benefits that you have pumped into the rural economy by rural credit inputs and other things, do not bother about raising agricultural production. They are more interested in making quick money and quick profits. They are interested in exploiting the agricultural labourers and other sections of the toiling peasantry and making money by speculation and hoarding, which, of course, is helped by certain policies of the Government. As a result, and because of the patronage that you reserved for the big people in the rural areas, you are not in a position today, not even in this Budget, to tap the resources and savings in the rural sector of the economy generated by heavy investment of nearly rupees 6,000 crores. That is why you do not adopt measures for tapping resources through agricultural income tax, whereby you could easily get 1,000 crores of rupees. If you had got that money, it would not have been necessary for you to raise the excise duty to the level of rupees 3,000 odd crores. In the industrial sector, what do we see? It is the Monopoly Capital, which is deliberately stopping production, compelling you, on the one hand, to give them concessions in the name of incentive production, and, on the other hand, gaining extra super profits by raising prices, creating artificial scarcities, and starving the nation. That is what is happening. Therefore, the villain of the piece is the big money, whether it is divided in the agricultural economy or the industrial economy. Today, instead of taking measures against them, you are giving concessions to them in the name of production. We are all for production. This nation will not survive if, by the toil of our countrymen, we do not raise production. We, the Communists, are a part of the working class, and hence we attach importance to production. Production is the article of faith with the working class of our land and of all countries. They are not shying away from production. Who is responsible for retrenchment and closures? Who is responsible for deliberately cutting production? Who is responsible for reducing the production of coarse and medium cloth in order to produce superfine cloth, which they could cater to the upper classes and for exports, in order to gain extra profit? Has it been seen how the production of coarse and medium varieties of cloth and articles of mass consumption by the common man has been deliberately and systematically reduced by the Monopoly class, with a view to creating scarcity and making money out of the privations of the common man? Here, Sir, only today there has been a question where it has been said that the amount due to the Damodar Valley Corporation from the consumers of electricity, surely big people who take electricity from the Damodar Valley Corporation, a public sector undertaking, is rupees 100 lakhs from J.K. Aluminium and rupees 50 lakhs from Tatas. These are the two Monopoly concerns. Here, they are owing you money, and you do not collect. It is they who are in arrears of income tax. Their gross income tax arrears come to rupees 800 crores, out of which effective arrears would come to about rupees 400 crores, out of which again, the share of the Monopoly houses in the matter of tax evasion is more than rupees 300 crores. What are you doing to them? It is they who, by under invoicing and over invoicing, make money and deny you your foreign exchange resources. It is estimated by competent economists that these people are cheating you to the tune of rupees 1,000 crores annually. It is a very massive amount. What action has the Government taken to recover this enormous source of income?E

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