The Congress on Saturday expressed bewilderment at the government’s announcements on space travel and planetary exploration as part of its coronavirus relief package while thousands of migrant workers were walking hundreds of miles home in the absence of buses or trains.

The party asked what relevance the opening of the space sector to private parties, airport privatisation and an enhanced FDI cap in defence production might have to the management of the Covid-19 crisis, for which the relief package was ostensibly designed.

It asserted that not one announcement in the fourth tranche of the government’s Rs 20 lakh crore package had any connection to the coronavirus threat and that the poor had not got a paisa out of it.

The Congress kept its focus on the misery of the migrant workers. Rahul Gandhi held a news conference on the subject in the morning, and later stepped out to meet a group of workers walking home to Jhansi in Madhya Pradesh.

He talked to them for almost an hour on a flyover near Sukhdev Vihar in Delhi, sitting on the pavement with them. He persuaded the group of 14 not to walk and asked the Delhi Congress and Youth Congress chiefs to help them. Congress workers gave them food and arranged for their transport home.

The Congress has also sought permission from the Uttar Pradesh government to run 1,000 buses at its cost from Ghaziabad and Noida to ferry the returning migrant workers home.

A letter from general secretary Priyanka Gandhi seeking the permission was handed to the chief minister’s office on Saturday, hours after the accident in Auraiya.

Congress spokesperson Gourav Vallabh asked why the government was so apathetic towards the workers.

“What finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced is not even remotely linked to the humanitarian and economic crisis of the present. It is like she is buying a cow when the patient is on ventilator. She will sell the milk and set up a hospital with that money. Then the patient will be treated there,” he said.

“I ask the Prime Minister, is there a single paisa in today’s package for the migrant worker, farmer, small business, middle-income people who lost their jobs?”

Vallabh said the Congress opposed the raising of the FDI cap in defence production. “The UPA government had specifically rejected a proposal to increase the FDI limit in defence manufacturing from 49 per cent to 74 per cent. We strongly object to this proposal as it will have serious national security ramifications,” he said.

“Also, in the name of corporatisation, we strongly object to the privatisation of ordnance factories. These factories require modernisation, not privatisation in the garb of corporatisation.”Reacting to the Centre’s claim about necessary reform, Vallabh said: “Even the (November 2016) demonetisation was proposed as a great reform.”

He said: “The basic question is, does the finance minister believe the nation is in a crisis? We have these daily press conferences because the nation is under a severe humanitarian and economic crisis of proportions, not seen since Independence. Does the finance minister not believe so? What is this game of packaging old announcements and policies as new schemes aimed at Covid-19 relief?”

Praveen Chakravarty, head of the Congress’s data analytics department, too addressed the media conference.