YSR Congress party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy is banking completely on his welfare agenda, apart from his social engineering formula.
For the last few months, Jagan is directly going into people and addressing public meetings, just to press button of the computer to release money under various welfare schemes, though it should have been done from his office.
Reason is that the YSRC chief wants maximum publicity to his welfare schemes which he believes would fetch him huge political mileage.
He has realised how even minor restrictions in the implementation of welfare schemes is resulting in severe backlash from the public.
Under these circumstances, the nation-wide debate on the so-called “freebies” being offered to the people is causing a worry to the ruling party.
The Narendra Modi government at the Centre, too, is seriously resisting the indiscriminate “freebies” being promised by political parties in the name of welfare schemes.
The issue is now in the Supreme Court, which is keenly hearing the subject.
Though the Supreme Court bench headed by chief justice of India N V Ramana said the court cannot pass any orders to stop parties from making such promises, it is still entertaining the petition saying there should be a consensus on this freebies’ issue in the wake of country’s economic position.
Apparently realising that there might be some restrictions on the implementation of these welfare schemes ultimately, the YSRC has filed an impleading petition in the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
In his petition before the Supreme Court, YSRC general secretary V Vijay Sai Reddy mentioned that the direct benefit transfer schemes being implemented by the state government in areas such as education, health, woman empowerment, agriculture, housing, poverty alleviation and support to the old and needy, should not be considered as freebies.
He said though programmes that are devoid of any true purpose and are implemented only for the purpose of luring the voters should necessarily be termed as freebies, painting the programmes of vast socio-economic importance that are being implemented to alleviate the prevailing distress with the same brush is, to say the least, an insult to the Constitutional mandate.
Sai Reddy said expenditure on sectors such as education, health, agriculture and poverty eradication would create and strengthen long term human capital and assets of vast socio-economic significance.
“Yet, these schemes are recognized as revenue expenditure just because of the fact that, no tangible asset is created from such expenditure and they are being viewed as a wasteful expenditure,” he regretted.
He pointed out that several economists have pointed out that the direct transfer of benefits have achieved positive outcomes with respect to education, health etc.