A day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an ambitious plan to step up infrastructure spending and recapitalise public sector banks, the Congress termed the move as “offering a bottle of glucose to a patient who is on the ventilator of an intensive care unit...”
Congress leader Anand Sharma, at a press conference, said the government’s claim of India displaying sound economic fundamentals was wrong. “Two things have hurt the economy. First the note ban and then the flawed GST. In MSME sector, 33% jobs were lost and that means 3.7 crore jobs. The Finance Minister should speak responsibly. He said we are the fastest growing economy but that’s not true. China is growing at 6.9% and their economy is five times bigger than ours,” he claimed.
He said negative gross capital formation, falling investment levels and the lowest credit off take in many decades were all indicators of a ‘hurt economy.” He asserted that the Tuesday announcements just showed the “government has woken up and realised how bad the situation was”.