Govt has 'blatantly lied' about LPG subsidy: Jairam Ramesh

Congress on Tuesday latched on to a CAG report to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several Union ministers, accusing them of "blatantly lying" on the issue of saving in LPG subsidy.

Party spokesman Jairam Ramesh told reporters that the CAG report submitted last week has showed that the saving in LPG subsidy due to the government's PAHAL scheme was a mere Rs 1,764 crore. This was at variance with the claims of the Prime Minister as also Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, he said.

He claimed that the Prime Minister, in his independence day address last year, had said that the saving was to the tune of Rs 15,000 crore while Jaitley, Pradhan and Subramanian had said it was in the range of Rs 11,000 crore to Rs 15,000 crore. "This showed how the government has lied blatantly. It is but just one example of the Modi government's constant stream of falsehoods and misrepresentations," Ramesh alleged.