As prime minister Manmohan Singh went on to claim that the UPA government has always fulfilled its promises and that it does not make promises it cannot fulfil during a Congress parliamentary group on Wednesday, a Delhi based civil society group has begged to differ.

In the report titled ‘Civil Society Review: Nine Years of UPA I & II’, New Delhi based advocacy group, Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (WNTA) has reviewed the nine years of the UPA tenure and has claimed that the UPA government has broken its promises on many fronts.

“In the area of health too, we have made progress,” the prime minister had said. But the civil society group’s report shows that the government was unable to spend the promised amount of two-three percent of the GDP and instead spent only around one percent. “As of 2013-14, there exists a shortage of 64 lakh allied health professionals,” the report revealed.

During its first tenure the UPA government had launched the most ambitious target of addressing critical problems of urban cities through the Jawaharlal Nehru urban renewal mission (JNNURM) and also promised to ensure development of slums in 63 selected cities. The report however, shows that even in 2013, housing shortage in urban areas is expected to grow from the estimated 26.53 million dwelling units to enormous proportions.

Further, contradicting the PM’s claim of almost all children in the country being enrolled in schools in the recent years, the report has shown that around 8 million children continue to remain out of schools. “The fact that less than 10 percent schools in the country are right to education compliant in terms of infrastructure and availability of teachers is reflective of the reality of poor performance,” the report said.

On the new food security law enacted in September, the report has said that the act “does not do much to address nutrition deficiency and does not talk of raising resources to include pulses and edible oil in PDS”. The government had also promised of universal coverage of the integrated child development services (ICDS) but an analysis of performance reports of nodal ministries shows the scheme is “way short” of reaching its 1.17 crore intended beneficiaries, the report said.

The report has further slammed the government for poor tax collection and said that collections had actually gone down during the UPA regime. “The total tax revenue collected by the centre and states (combined) had fallen from 17.4 percent of GDP in 2007-08 to 14.7 percent of GDP in 2010-11,” according to the report.

The Congress party has always tried to woo the weaker sections of the society including the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and the minorities by introducing a number of welfare schemes for them but the report reveals that there have been shortfalls in the implementation of all the programmes. “The budgetary allocation to welfare schemes is a major hurdle in reaching out to the last person in the country. It is not an economical issue but a political issue. Why there is not enough funding for the social sector,” said A K Shiva Kumar, member of the Sonia Gandhi led national advisory council (NAC).

“The Congress' future would not be based on unreal promises unlike other parties,” the PM has claimed. But the million dollar question which arises here is what about all the promises where the delivery mechanism adopted has been dubious.