Interest cut will hit poor hard, says Congress

“Slashing interest rates on small savings _ on PPF and KVPs, is yet another assault by the Modi Govt on hard working middle class people,” the Congress Vice President said in a series of tweets.” This Govt has failed farmers, failed the poor and now it’s failing the middle class. Modiji ppl are seeing through your event management politics! (sic),” he said.

“The Narendra Modi government seems hell bent on fleecing the ordinary poor, middle and lower-middle class. It is a criminal breach of trust with hapless people who put their money in the custody of the government of India with the belief that they will not be cheated,” Congress chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala said on Friday night. 

He said the decision to slash interest rates on small savings schemes PPF and KVP, which contains small and lifetime savings and investments of salaried employees of non-government sector, marginal farmers and street vendors, was nothing but an “overt attempt at robbing money by snatching it from unsuspecting individuals”. 

He said Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, along with their cohorts in Sangh Parivar, have developed a “deceitful and devious” modus operandi of first creating an atmosphere where the public discourse gets consumed by and involved in some “inane controversy” and then introduces these anti-people policies while public and media attention is away. “One is flabbergasted by this attitude of this government, which entails letting wilful defaulters of public money escape, encourages tax evaders by launching ‘fair and lovely’ schemes and benefits from cutting into savings of ordinary middle and lower middle class people,” he said. 

In a statement, CPM politburo said “this reduction in interest rates in small savings will hit the poor and the middle class badly as bulk of their savings are in small deposits. Coming after the increase announced in the prices of petroleum products, this reduction of interest rates is going to affect the savings of the poor and the middle class, whose livelihoods are constantly under attack.”