‘A Guru Is Always A Guru’ Congress Takes A Dig At NDA On 1 Crore Internship Opportunities
The Congress on Tuesday after Finance Minister tabled the Union budget 2024 in the Parliament said Nirmala Sitharaman has taken a leaf out of its Lok Sabha polls manifesto by announcing the internship programme.
In the Union Budget 2024-25, Sitharaman announced that the government will launch a scheme to provide internship opportunities to 1 crore youth in 500 top companies over five years.
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Congress took a jibe at the NDA government and posted on X, “A guru is always a guru”. The image shared by the party included the internship programme mentioned in the party’s manifesto titled, “Pehli Naukri Pakki”.
— Congress (@INCIndia) July 23, 2024
Congress general secretary, Jairam Ramesh, claimed that the internship initiative is modelled after Congress’s proposed Apprenticeship Program, named Pehli Naukri Pakki, which was detailed in their 2024 Lok Sabha manifesto.
He criticized the scheme’s design and stated that in their trademark style, and said the scheme has been designed to grab headlines, rather than a programmatic guarantee for all diploma holders and graduates.
During the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress in its manifesto introduced a Right to Apprenticeship Act if they came to power. This act would ensure a one-year apprenticeship with a private or public sector company for every diploma holder or college graduate under the age of 25.
Ramesh in another post also highlighted the government’s shift in acknowledging unemployment as a critical issue after years of neglect.
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He wrote, “After ten years of denial — where neither the non-biological prime minister nor his party’s Lok Sabha election manifesto mentioned jobs — the central government seems to have finally tacitly acknowledged that mass unemployment is a national crisis that needs urgent attention. But it is too late now and nothing concrete has been done to address the problem – the budget speech focused more on posturing than action”.
