Highlights of Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi's Press Conference in Chennai, 10th September 2009 Press

My responsibility as general secretary of Congress Party is to build the Youth Congress.

The process is designed to bring in young boys and girls in Youth Congress and NSUI.

Most important thing in the Youth Congress here is that we start opening our doors to the energy of this country.

We should be worried about engaging with our people as a political organization.

The roadmap for the Congress Party is to go as close to people, as far as possible, go to the villages and the Panchayats and to understand what the people want.
That is the roadmap.

I feel this country has extremely dynamic youngsters; they are making us proud everywhere across the world.

Open system means anybody who wants to join us is most welcome to join us.

Our system is open; the only barrier we put is the barrier of criminality and the barrier of extreme views in regards to religion. We will not tolerate fundamentalists on either side. If you are an open-minded normal thinking youngster, doesn’t matter which field you come from. Our system is open for you.

This country started of as one country and everybody in this country was poor. Sixty years of work and today we have developed two Indias. One India is rich and one India is poor. You can say that one India has infrastructure, roads, connectivity and other India doesn’t.

But everyone among us knows that there are two Indias.

The idea is that you take the India with opportunities, you grow that India and you take some of the benefits and you put them into the villages and you engage and involve that India into this first one. That is our view.

And that is the idea of Aam aadmi. And the weapons which we are using, NAREGA is one such weapon, massive expansion of the education system is another weapon, massive expansion of health system is the third weapon and Universal ID is the fourth weapon.

We are going to bridge these two Indias and are going to make sure that this One India which is firm has opportunity for all. Our schemes are aimed at bridging both Indias.


NAREGA has reshaped the labour market in this country.

The real power of NAREGA is in how it reshapes the labour market and puts a floor below poor people and gives them support by not letting them fall below a certain level.