NEW DELHI: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has mastered the “art of slogans” but offers no solutions and claimed that India’s manufacturing was at a record low despite the ‘Make in India’ initiative.“’Make in India promised a factory boom. So why is manufacturing at record lows, youth unemployment at record highs, and why have imports from China more than doubled? The PM has mastered the art of slogans, not solutions. Since 2014, manufacturing has fallen to 14 per cent of our economy,” he said in a post on X.Gandhi said Modi has “no new ideas” and has “surrendered”. “Even the much-hyped PLI scheme is now being quietly rolled back,” he alleged.He said India needs a fundamental shift, one that empowers lakhs of producers through honest reforms and financial support.“We must stop being a market for others. If we don’t build here, we’ll keep buying from those who do. The clock is ticking,” said the leader of opposition in Lok Sabha.The Congress leader met mobile repair technicians at Nehru Place in the capital and attached a video of the conversation to the post.“I met Shivam and Saif, both bright, skilled and full of promise – yet denied the opportunity.”Noting that there is a difference between ‘Made in India’ and ‘Assembled in India’, he said: “The truth is stark: we assemble, we import, but we don’t build. China profits. China is the world’s electronic market. There is no other electronic market anywhere. Assemble as many iPhones as you want, all you are doing is giving money to the big oligopolies of India. Start making iPhones, it’s a completely different ball game,” he said.The former Congress chief said to manufacture parts, whether it is a motherboard or “small pieces”, you need a certain level of machining, a certain level of quality, a certain level of understanding of tolerances of working with small components. “And, at the centre of it, and people don’t like it when I say it, is the idea of caste. We need to make this transparent. We need to show exactly how Indian society distributes power,” he said.
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