Rahul Gandhi Offers Rare Praise for 'Make In India' in Lok Sabha, Then Criticizes It as 'Failed'

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. He hit out at 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.

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. He hit out at 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.

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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 had alleged that the President's speech seemed to him a rehash of the past one and did not contain new ideas and offered to present an outline of a speech that an INDI bloc would present when coming to power. 

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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.

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Describing the coming era as the 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.

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The answer is nothing, India does not have any form of data," he said, urging education for children on the four revolutionary technologies and building a production network to access production data. China has at least a 10-years lead on India in the use of these technologies, and we have to start building capabilities in those areas, he said.

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