The Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee on Wednesday accused the state government of discriminating against students who have opted for Urdu and Parsi, and separately attacked the Centre’s latest GDP figures as misleading.
At a press conference organised by the OPCC media department, AICC national spokesperson Dr Hamid Hussain said the government supplies textbooks to students of Odia, English, Sanskrit and Hindi at the primary, upper-primary and high-school levels, but not to those who have chosen Urdu as mother tongue (MIL) or Urdu/Parsi as a third language.
“Students who selected Urdu and Parsi have not received books for those subjects,” Hussain said. He added that 289 of 804 sanctioned Urdu teacher posts in government-aided madrasas remain vacant and that recruitment has been delayed.
Senior Congress leader Mohammed Imdad described the condition of Urdu-medium students in Bhubaneswar as “pathetic.” State minority department secretary Mallik Inamul said nearly 1,000 students in Kakatpur block alone had opted for Urdu and were struggling without textbooks. He also cited around 2,000 errors in school textbooks and demanded the education minister’s resignation.
Congress leaders said Urdu is taught in high schools in Kendrapara, Pattamundai and Aali but teachers are in short supply, and the shortage is statewide. The party demanded immediate supply of prescribed Urdu and Parsi textbooks.
GDP claims called ‘statistical jugglery’At a separate briefing at Congress Bhavan, former state finance minister and senior leader Panchanan Kanungo rejected the Centre’s 7.8 per cent GDP growth figure. Citing former finance secretary Subhash Garg, he said actual growth was closer to 2.6 per cent, and that advertising 7.8 per cent when the real number was far lower was “equivalent to a criminal act.”
Kanungo alleged the government was using base-year revisions and statistical changes to present a rosier picture than the ground reality of weak job creation, stagnant private investment and low household incomes. He said the Modi government had failed to generate employment for youth or to boost MSMEs and private investment, and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2047 developed-India slogan was “illusion, not a plan.”
Congress spokesperson Jagadananda Pradhan alleged that wholesale price inflation had not been properly reflected in the GDP calculation and that the methodology itself had been altered. He asked why 100 million new jobs had not been created in the first decade of the Modi government if the economy was as strong as claimed.
Pradhan cited a large India–China trade imbalance (imports of about $131.63 billion versus exports of $19.47 billion), called Make in India “Fake in India,” and pointed to wealth concentration: 1 per cent of the population holding 40 per cent of assets, the top 10 per cent holding 65 per cent, and the bottom 50 per cent holding only 15 per cent.
He also listed other indicators the party says contradict the growth narrative: families borrowing for daily expenses, rural wages barely above inflation, stagnant private investment, net FDI as a share of GDP near zero, youth unemployment around 16 per cent, the rupee falling from about Rs 58 to Rs 95 per dollar compared with the UPA period, and public debt rising from Rs 53 lakh crore under 14 earlier prime ministers to Rs 270 lakh crore under the current government, with interest payments consuming a large share of revenue.
Dr Hussain added that the rupee’s slide from Rs 54 to the dollar in 2013 to Rs 95 now, together with debt of Rs 274 lakh crore, pointed to a weakened economy.
The official government figure for real GDP growth in the April–June quarter of FY 2026-27 is 7.8 per cent. Critics, including Garg, argue that downward revision of the previous year’s nominal GDP makes year-on-year growth look stronger; the government and several economists say comparing figures from different statistical series is invalid.
