New Delhi, July 31 (Inditop.com) MPs of the four Left front parties Friday staged a walkout in the Lok Sabha demanding that the government announce a stimulus package for labourers who had lost their jobs due to the economic recession.
The 24 MPs of the Left parties — Communist Party of India-Marxist, Communist Party of India, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Forward Bloc — were aggrieved that the government had announced relief packages only for the corporate sector but not for those who lost jobs due to closure of industrial units, including those in the IT sector.
They made the assertion during discussion on a calling attention notice moved by the CPI-M and CPI wanting to know the measures initiated by the government to help those who had lost jobs.
The notice was jointly given by Gurudas Dasgupta (CPI) and Basudev Acharia and A. Sampath of the CPI-M.
The communists staged a walkout when Labour and Employment Minister Mallikarjun Kharge told the house in his reply that the “positive effects of the three stimulus packages given by the government will benefit the employment sector also”.
They charged the government with providing exemptions and stimulus only to the corporates and ignoring the labourers.
The Left party members said a meeting with all the trade unions should be called for this purpose.
Earlier, the minister said: “The impact of the global slowdown on the Indian economy has been felt since mid-2008. To counter the negative fallout of the global slowdown, the government of India has provided three focussed fiscal stimulus packages.”
Kharge said the packages were “in the form of tax relief and increased expenditure on public projects, while the Reserve Bank of India has taken a number of monetary easing and liquidity enhancing steps in order to boost the domestic demand”.
The minister argued that these measures had helped keep the Indian economy “on the growth trajectory, though at a moderate level as compared to the performance in the recent past”.
