‘Low GDP Growth Responsible for More People Giving Up Indian Citizenship’: Congress

Gaurav Vallabh has said that the trend has been showing an upward graph in the last two years, and questioned whether the Union government’s claim of “acchhe din” or good days was hyperbole.

New Delhi: More than 1.8 lakh people gave up their Indian citizenship in the first 10 months of 2022, the Congress said on Tuesday, January 11, while taking a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Amrit Kaal’.

Quoting from figures given by the Ministry of External Affairs, party spokesperson Gaurav Vallabh said that the daily average of those Indians renouncing their citizenship has increased from 354 in 2014 to 448 in 2021 and 604 in 2022 – a growth of 1.7 times.

He said that the trend has been showing an upward graph in the last two years, and questioned whether the Union government’s claim of “acchhe din” or good days was actually hyperbole. He also pointed out that around 7,000 of those who renounced their Indian citizenship in 2022 were High Net Worth Individuals with an annual income of more than Rs 8 crore.

“In 2014, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) data showed 1,29,328 renounced Indian citizenship while in 2021, it was 1,63,370. In 2022, till October 31, such cases were 1,83,741,” Vallabh said at the press briefing before moving on to lay down some of the declining development parameters that he believed was responsible for the exodus.

The Congress spokesperson quoted from data of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy to emphasise upon the increasing unemployment in India. “In 2022, unemployment level was more than 7% in 9 out of 12 months. This figure was 8.3% in December 2022 and in case of urban unemployment, it was 10.9%,” he said, adding that the government felt the need of “hand holding people by giving free ration” to people only because it failed in securing jobs for them. 

Vallabh further alleged that one of the reasons that people are leaving India is the consistently low GDP growth – 8.3% in 2017 to 3.7% in 2020 – made possible by the government because of “the twin shocks of demonetisation and flawed implementation of GST” from which the economy hasn’t been able to recover yet. 

Citing a joint research report by United Nations Development Programme and Oxford University, Vallabh said that India had the maximum number of the poor in the world. “In 2020, there were 22.89 crore people in India who were below the poverty line, and 79% of people who became ‘extremely poor’ globally during the pandemic were Indians,” he said.

He went on to add that India’s ranking in the Global Hunger Index (2022) is an abysmal 107 among 121 countries, lower than even India’s neighbouring nations, even as the Global Gender Gap Index ( 2022) has put India at the 135th position out of 146 countries. He said that press freedom has also declined drastically as the World Press Freedom Index ranked India at 150 out of 180 countries in its 2022 report. “The report described India as ‘one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the media’,” he said. 

He then appealed to the Prime Minister to address these concerns of Indian people in his “Mann ki Baat” programme.