Tarun Sharma and Pranay Lakshminarasimhan
Moneycontrol News
After Congress President Rahul Gandhi posed a series of questions on social media to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over its performance in Gujarat over the last 22 years, the BJP on Tuesday put out a set of key metrics that mapped the progress made in the state since 1995.
With an aim to counter BJP’s development narrative in the increasingly heated Gujarat assembly elections campaign, Rahul Gandhi had posted his first question to the party from his Twitter handle on November 28.
The question pertained to Narendra Modi’s campaign promise made in 2012 of building 50 lakh new houses for the people of the state, saying only 5 lakh houses were made over the last five years.
The other questions, which Gandhi kept posting one at a time and one for each day, were all of a similar nature. The Congress focused on issues like the state’s overall debt and how much it has increased by, cost of procurement of power, education of girls in the state and the problems of farmers.
After keeping mum for a fortnight, the BJP on Tuesday put out a table of key metrics in the state for the year 1995-96 — when the Congress lost power to the BJP — and their corresponding figures for 2016-17, as a response to these questions.
The numbers revealed that both Gujarat's GDP and per capita income had multiplied by more than 10 times over the period. The number of universities in the state went from seven in 1995-6 to 57 in 2016-17 and the number of teachers working in primary, secondary and higher secondary schools nearly doubled to over 4.64 lakh.
In the table below, we have compiled some of the most important metrics compared in the report card compiled by the BJP.
| Metric | Unit | 1995-96 | 2016-17 |
| Gujarat GDP | Rs crore | 71,886 | 10,33,791 |
| Per capita income | Rs | 13,665 | 1,41,504 |
| Development expense | Rs crore | 7,662 | 1,03,498 |
| BPL households | % | 31.60 (2004-05) | 16.63 (2011-12) |
| Infant mortality rate | % | 62 | 33 |
| Primary healthcare centres | nos | 957 | 1,393 |
| School drop-out rate (Std 1 to 8) | % | 51.25 | 6.06 |
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