BJP has responded to Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge’s taunt of U-turn on Unified Pension Scheme. Talking to media persons, when senior party leader Ravi Shankar Prasad was asked about this, he said that Congress had kept the implementation of old pension scheme on top in its election promises, but even after so much time of forming government in Himachal and Karnataka, not a single meeting has been held on this till date. When will this happen? Ravi Shankar Prasad, while targeting Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, said that I want to ask him whether his government has implemented the old pension scheme in Himachal Pradesh as per its election promise.
Former law minister Prasad said that the Congress party has misled the public by giving false assurances about pension. The Congress party was so afraid of the public due to its lies on the old pension that it did not even include the issue of restoration of the old pension scheme in its election manifesto. The Congress party only wants to get votes and for this it can lie at any level. Prasad said that running a government in India is a serious job, it is not a matter of lying, the Congress party is a party that gets votes on the basis of lies, it misleads the public and makes false announcements and when it wins somewhere, it goes back on its announcements. Now the public has lost faith in its decisions.
Earlier, the decision taken by the cabinet talked about the unified pension system. This pension system retains many features of the old pension system. Under this scheme, any employee who remains in government service for 25 years will get 50 percent of his total salary of the last year of service as pension.
Employees had started expressing their anger on the New Pension Scheme launched by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government in 2004 from the very beginning. Due to this, the Modi government has brought amendments in it. Employees demand that the old pension scheme be restored, in which the entire responsibility of giving pension lies with the government and the employee does not have to make any contribution in it.
When the Unified Pension Scheme was brought forward by the Centre yesterday, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge took a jibe at it and said that the U in it stands for U-turn.