Congress demands rollback of Agnipath scheme

Hyderabad: Congress party on Sunday demanded the Centre to immediately withdraw the controversial Agnipath scheme that caused nationwide uproar for the last couple of days. TPCC working president Mahesh Kumar Goud alleged that the Union government had come up with the scheme as it wanted to reduce the burden of pensions and expenditure being made on the armed forces of the country.

Referring to the condition of the scheme that the beneficiaries of the scheme should retire after completion of four years service, he likened it to a woman, who turned into a widow after a marriage of four years. Stating that out of the four years of service, six months are meant for training the selected candidates, he asked the Centre as to what the candidates would learn during the six months of training programme? He said the Centre was insulting the soldiers of the country by introducing the contract and outsourcing jobs in the Defence sector. He said the youth had not bowed down to the preventive acts of the police as they did not like the scheme.

Targeting the Union government, he alleged that industrialists like Adani had developed in Modi's rule. He alleged that the Central government was now planning to handover the agriculture sector of the country to Adani and the people were very unlucky as they have an uneducated Prime Minister like Narendra Modi.