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Congress manifesto

aims at poverty

NEW DELHI: India's Congress party unveiled a populist election platform on Friday aimed at business and poverty.

A confident Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao hinted that economic tsar Manmohan Singh would stay as finance minister and seemed to have little doubt that the party would return with a comfortable majority.

Rao said that for the first time in the country's history he saw a concrete programme taking shape to address basic problems.

"Ten years back, to a foreigner, the problems of this country looked insoluble. They looked so daunting that any government would only end up scratching the surface."

He said the government had gained "supreme courage and confidence...because we are able to see the end of the road".

Rao, who launched India's most sweeping economic reforms after his surprise elevation to the job in 1991, said he was confident of victory in the coming polls even without the charisma of a Gandhi or a Nehru at the party's helm.

The reforms were aimed at demolishing more than four decades of socialist policies pursued by Rao's predecessors. The manifesto predictably extolled the reforms, but focused on what the party aimed to do for the poor, who comprise most of the nation's 590 million eligible voters.

The Congress's 40-page manifesto said: "The abolition of poverty remains the foremost objective of the Congress government. The very poor in India do not have property. They do not have jobs. Often they do not have work."

Rao was asked by reporters to spell out tax programmes that would be needed to fund projects for the poor.-Reuter