Rahul Gandhi’s rare praise for ‘Make In India’ project in LS, followed by jibe

Congress MP and the Leader of Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi on Monday made a rare praise for the ‘Make In India’ program, even commending the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for bringing in the ‘good idea’ but then went to disapprove it by calling it ‘damp squib’. 

Speaking in the Lok Sabha during the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address, Gandhi said ‘Make in India’ was conceptually good but the PM failed to deliver the results despite making a good effort.

“Prime Minister proposed the Make In India program. I think it was a good idea, however the result is in front of you all, ” said the Congress MP.

He slammed the NDA government for allowing the manufacturing to decline from 15.3 per cent of the GDP in 2014 to 12.6 per cent, as of now.

“I am not blaming the Prime Minister, it would be wrong to say that he didn’t try. I could say that he tried but failed,” he added.

Talking about unemployment, Gandhi said that India, as a nation, has collectively failed to address joblessness.

“Both the UPA and the NDA have not been able to offer a solution to the youth over joblessness,” he said.

Earlier, he said the President’s address appeared to him to be a repeat of the previous and lacked new ideas and offered to present a blueprint of an address that an INDI bloc would present on coming to power.

Calling unemployment as a social problem and linking it to social unrest, Gandhi said the increasing number of people in jail, the rising amount of money being spent on police forces and internal security reflected the rising social tension in the country.

Addressing the policy makers, Gandhi said that the country needs to better organise its production.

“All governments since 1990 have done well in organising consumption or services but production or manufacturing has lagged,” he said.

Describing the coming era as a door to a revolutionary battle between electric motor and internal combustion motors, Gandhi said the four technologies driving the entire revolution are – electric motor, batteries, optics and artificial intelligence.

“AI on its own is nothing without data. And when we look at data today, it is very clear that the production data used to make mobile phones or cars is owned by China and the consumption data is owned by the US,” he said, asking India to introspect on what data is going to drive its AI revolution.

“The answer is nothing, India does not have any form of data,” he said, calling for educating children about the four revolutionary technologies and building a production network to get access to production data.

China has at least a 10-years lead on India over the use of these technologies and we need to start building capabilities in these areas, he said.