E-Paper
Agnipath a ‘national security’ scheme, cannot abolish it: Finance Minister
Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday emphatically rejected the Opposition’s demand to abolish the Agniveer short-service recruitment scheme in the Rajya Sabha, classifying it as a decision for “national security” and accusing “vested interests” for lobbying to scrap the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for “selling” medical seats.
Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday emphatically rejected the Opposition’s demand to abolish the Agniveer short-service recruitment scheme in the Rajya Sabha, classifying it as a decision for “national security” and accusing “vested interests” for lobbying to scrap the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for “selling” medical seats.
These were the two of the five “demands” made by Congress leader P Chidambaram during his speech on the Union budget on July 24. Towards the end of her over two hour-long response to various questions and issues in the Upper House, Sitharaman said: “Former finance minister [referring to Chidambaram without naming him]… had said, I’ve got five questions for which I want the finance minister [Sitharaman] to answer. And the five questions pertain to minimum wages, legal guarantee, education loan waiver, abolition of Agniveer, scrapping of NEET. … I just want to give very quick response to each one of the points.”
Starting the debate on the Union Budget on July 24, Chidambaram had articulated five demands and urged the finance minister to respond. “Our first demand is minimum wage of ₹400 per day for every kind of employment. Two, we demand a legally-guaranteed minimum support price. Three, we demand a write-off of the unpaid balance of interest or instalment of educational loans given up to March, 2024. Four, we demand abolition, complete abolition, of the Agniveer Scheme, and, five, we demand that NEET be scrapped, and, if some states want to keep NEET, exempt all other states which do not want NEET. These five demands will echo not only in this chamber but throughout the country until you concede these demands,” he had said.
Speaking about the minimum wage demand in her response on Wednesday, Sitharaman said presumably the former FM was talking about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) where he wanted a minimum wage of ₹400 per day.
On education loans, she said the budget already announced measures for helping young people not getting any other government benefits. “We have announced the financial support of ₹10 lakhs for higher education within the country. E-vouchers for this purpose will be given directly to 1 lakh students every year for an annual interest subvention of 3% of the loan amount,” she said.
Speaking about Agniveer scheme, she said, “Former finance minister has also served as former home minister. I’m sure he also understands the nuance involved in national security. Agniveer is a very reformative step to enhance the capabilities and battle readiness of our armed forces. It ensures actually that we have fit soldiers who are on the front line,” she said, adding that one of the outcomes of the scheme is reduction in the average age of the Indian soldiers.
She asked politicians not to do politics over matters of national security.
Agnipath was a major departure from the military’s decades-old recruitment system that was scrapped when the NDA government announced the new scheme in June 2022. It seeks to recruit soldiers for only four years, with a provision to retain 25% of them in regular service. Those recruited under the scheme are called Agniveers. The scheme is a major election issue in states such as Punjab and Haryana.
In her speech, Sitharaman defended NEET as a system that checked the selling of medical seats by the lobby seeking to scrap it. She said the question was posed a day before the Supreme Court’s final verdict, and hence, the matter was settled.
“Supreme Court did not scrap NEET exams. It observed that there is no material at the present stage to indicate any systemic leak. That’s about the NEET exam leakage. But, abolition of NEET, I’m afraid to say, was triggered even before the leak,” she said.
NEET was notified in December 2010, she noted. “Who was leading the implementation at that time? It was led by the then DMK minister Gandhiselvan, who served as MoS for health and family welfare as part of the Congress-led UPA-II Government,” she said.
Sitharaman said NEET immensely helped aspirants coming from poor families and cited names of several successful students who were sons and daughters of labourers and underprivileged.
The NEET-UG examination in 2024 was engulfed in chaos and widespread protests across India, with thousands of students demonstrating against allegations of question paper leaks, inflated marking, and arbitrary allowance of grace marks. Opposition parties called for a Supreme Court-monitored probe into the allegations but the government ruled out a retest, maintaining that the leaks were localised and arguing that cancelling the exam would be unfair to the successful candidates. A number of other top examinations such as UGC-NET were also postponed. The top court finally ruled against a retest, finding that there was no conclusive evidence of a widespread paper leak.
The finance minister, however, missed elaborating on one of the five demands on Wednesday, which was related to the legal guarantee for MSP. Speaking about it on Tuesday in the Lok Sabha, she had accused the Congress and the INDIA bloc partners of “doing good lot of politics” on the farmers.
“I am saying it with consideration. I am not speaking loosely. The National Commission on Farmers, MS Swaminathan had recommended in 2006 minimum support price should be at 50% more than the weighted average cost of production. This was not accepted by the UPA government. The cabinet note, which was drafted in July 2007 said and I quote: “… MSP is recommended by the CACP on objective criteria considering a variety of factors involved. Therefore, setting an increase of at least 50 per cent on the cost may cause distortion in the market. In some cases, there may be a mechanical linkage between MSP and cost of production per producer …,” she had said on Tuesday.
