The Union Budget has failed to address the fault lines of the Indian economy and came up with knee jerk reactions to fix some of the vexing issues, former Bengal finance minister Amit Mitra has said.

Describing the employment generating scheme announced by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman as another form of Agniveer — the controversial part-time job scheme for the armed forces — Mitra said it would be absurd to imagine the top 500 companies would be able to take 2 million interns.

“The scheme is for 12 months, that too voluntary. No mention of what will happen to the interns in the second year,” Mitra, who is now principal chief adviser to Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the state finance department, said.

He argued that companies would not be in a position to hire 4,000 interns on an average given that the number of interns proposed to be inducted under the scheme is one third of the total workforce of top 500 companies.

Mitra pointed out that the scheme indicates that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and FM Sitharaman acknowledged that there is unemployment but their response is tiny in the face of the problem.

Unemployment in India as of June according to CMIE data was 4.35 crore (people looking for a job but not got one) and the unemployment rate stood at 9.81 per cent.