hyderabad
The much touted Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) manifesto announced on Sunday by party president and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao appears to be a clever bid to trump the six guarantees promised by the Congress party last month at a public meeting addressed by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
A close look at the promises made shows that the BRS leadership has tried to woo the electorate by enhancing the financial assistance to the targeted groups.
For example, the Mahalaxmi guarantee given by the Congress promises ₹2,500 per month to eligible women while the BRS manifesto has announced a similar sop with monthly honorarium of ₹3,000.
If the Congress intends to provide domestic LPG (cooking gas) cylinder at ₹500, BRS has promised it at ₹400, although the fine line (guidelines) has not been specified by either of the two parties.
The BRS has tried to even outshine the Congress by increasing the financial dole of ₹15,000 per acre to farmers and tenant farmers. The BRS intends to increase Rythu Bandhu, given only to the landholding farmers, from ₹10,000 per acre per year to ₹16,000 over the next five years by increasing it by ₹1,000 every year from ₹12,000 to be given in the first year (from the next kharif season). In terms of value, it’s only ₹1,000 more than the Congress guarantee.
Similarly, the social security scheme, Aasara, is also an area where the BRS wanted to pip the Congress. While the Congress said it would give of ₹4,000 per month under the Cheyutha scheme, the BRS has assured ₹5,000. To begin with, each Aasara beneficiary would get ₹3,000 per month in the first year after BRS forming the next government. It would gradually touch ₹5,000 in the fifth year.
While announcing the manifesto, Mr. Chandrasekhar Rao took the credit for enhancing the social security pension amount from ₹100s to ₹1,000 or more for the first time in the country. Similarly, it was the idea of BRS to introduce the novel scheme of Rythu Bandhu to provide investment support to landholding farmers before two crop seasons every year.
“Of the promises made in 2018, we could not deliver only the unemployment allowance”, the BRS chief admitted and added that schemes for youth such as overseas education scholarships would be continued. He stated that BRS had taken to phased manner of enhancing the sops with fiscal prudence and claimed that the party’s record of implementing manifesto (2018) was 99.8%.