Over the last ten years domestic production stagnated in critical areas as the UPA pumped for imports and even subsidized imports. Imported Urea, DAP, Petrol and Diesel attracted huge state subsidies making it more profitable to import than to produce these goods. Even before bringing in the FDI in 2013 the UPA had pushed up India’s import bills and the Current Account Deficit to over 5 percent of the GDP. When the UPA came to power in 2004 India had a current account surplus of 1.5 percent of the GDP . There was no subsidy on petrol, diesel and neither on imported urea and DAP and the current account balance showed no deficit but an healthy surplus of $14 billion in the year ended March 2004.

How then did the situation deteriorate so rapidly in a decade? The deterioration has been charted and documented in my book Neta, Babu and Subsidy. Let us see what happened in the key infrastructure sectors one by one where the imports rose phenomenally, due to policies of the UPA that has again surprisingly been reiterated in the Congress Manifesto of 2014. The 9 years of UPA rule have seen a proliferation of NGO’s and right activists that have gone up by as much as 6000 % or sixty fold as per the vision plan laid down by Sonia’s National Advisory Committee. According to a SC directed CBI investigation there are an estimated 20 lakh NGO’s already operating in India with 5,48,194 in UP, 3,69,137 in Kerela 1,40,000 in MP, 1,07,797 in Maharashtra, and 75,279 in Gujarat (TOI 23 Feb) that makes 1 out of every 600 Indians a registered activist. There was no data from many major states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamilnadu, Himachal Pradesh and importantly the critical states of Odisha and Chattisgarh where the NGO’s are most active.

One of the key elements that boosted the import bill was the UPA policy in mining where these NGO’s helped create zones of conflict and slowed down mining of bauxite, iron ore, coal and all other mined products . Through active promotion of its right based approach (see Congress manifesto of 2014 and 2009) it encouraged foreign and Indian NGO’s to create pockets of resistance in tribal belts and and put up bureaucratic hurdles to curtail legitimate domestic mining thereby encouraging illegal mining and pushing up imports.

UPA’s union minister of tribal welfare V Kishore Chandra Deo wrote to Andhra Pradesh Governor to stop bauxite mining in Andhra along the eastern ghats where state run APMDC was doing bauxite mining in 1876 hectares of forest area. APMDC as a result failed to supply 3.8 million tons of bauxite annually and honour its 2008 agreement with Anarak Aluminium Ltd of the UAE which had invested over Rs 10,000 crore in a 1.5 million TPA Aluminum plant. Whereas India has huge reserves of bauxite with Araku Loksabha constituency represented by Deo alone holding reserves of a billion tons of bauxite, the UPA anti mining policy forced India to import bauxite. Similarly iron ore mining was banned in Karnataka and Goa that amounted to a production loss of 90 million tons annually and turned India from a net exporter to a net importer of ore.

In case of coal, imports have been rising each year and have jumped six fold from 20 million tonnes per annum when the UPA came to power to 125 million tonnes during 2011-12. Monopoly miner state owned CIL sitting on the fifth largest global coal reserves and a Rs 30,000 crore cash pile is mining ineffciently and crudely and supplying unwashed coal to most of its users in the steel and power sector. The PSU that employs a humungous 3.5 lakh workers saw its mine output go up by only 3.8 percent this year and its biggest customer NTPC accuse it of supplying poor quality coal full of stones and non-combustibles. As per IEA the coal imports of India will rise steadily to over 200 million TPA by 2020 and UPA’s import driven policy will see India importing more coal than ever before.