The Congress leader equated Modi with Ramalinga Raju of Satyam, who has been arrested for fudging his company’s accounts. “Like the way the Satyam founder fudged his firm’s accounts in one of the country’s biggest financial frauds, Modi is spreading lies about investment proposals his government claims to have received through its a-Satyam (untruth) vibrant Gujarat summits,” he told mediapersons here on Saturday.

Quoting official data accessed through the RTI route, Gohil said that as many as 130 projects, for which entrepreneurs had committed an investment of over Rs 68,000 crore during the last three VGGIS, have not fructified. He contested Modi’s claim of 63.5 per cent success rate in terms of implementation of proposed projects inked in the 2005 and 2007 summits, saying the success rate was well below 25 per cent.

The government boasts of having 76, 226 and 675 MoUs inked in 2003, 2005 and 2007 summits respectively, with the investment proposals of 14, 20 and 152 billion dollars in that order. “Had the government got these proposals implemented even by 40 per cent, the state’s public debt would not have piled up to a whopping Rs 80,000 crore, and diamond workers or small traders would not have committed suicide,” the Congress leader said.

Further quoting from the government records, Gohil said there are 4.59 lakh undergraduates, 1.99 lakh graduates and 22,000 diploma holders seeking jobs across the state. He said that Gujarat is vibrant “only in Modi’s mind and his selected coterie of people”. Driving home his point, he drew parallels between Gujarat and Kerala in terms of living standard of the common man.

The percentage of households having television sets in Kerala is 67.7 as against 53.8 in Gujarat, pucca houses in Kerala 84.1 and in Gujarat 56.4; access to toilet facility in Kerala 96 and in Gujarat 54.6; and having electricity in Kerala 91 and Gujarat 89.3, he said.

He went on to accuse the CM of favouring only major corporate houses, and ignoring the plight of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the state. “Of the total two lakh SMEs in Gujarat, over 62,000 units (most of them in small scale) have closed in the last 11 months. Out of 5,000 medium enterprises, whom the Reserve Bank of India had advanced loans, about 1,000 have downed their shutters,” he said.