A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chief Ministers to strive for double digit growth at the NITI Ayog’s Governing Council meeting, the Congress accused the government of “gross economic mismanagement” in the past 48 months, and said the performance of the previous UPA government was much better than NDA’s.
“The government should realise that social disharmony and economic progress can’t go hand in hand. Money always goes to the safest harbour. The spectre of intolerance is anathema to foreign investments,” former Union Minister Manish Tewari told presspersons.
The Congress posed a series of questions, asking the Modi government to place the revised GDP figures in the public domain and clarify “who is currently in charge of the Finance Ministry”. He said that different government websites made different claims: the PMO mentioned him as a Minister without portfolio, while the Finance Ministry called him the Finance Minister. “Why is it that the revised GDP series going back from 2011 have still not been put in the public domain despite the fact that the base year for calculating the GDP was revised in 2015,” Mr. Tewari asked.
Growth rate
He said that “according to economists, if one calculates the GDP rate in the new base year, then between 2004 and 2009 [term of UPA I], the growth rate comes to 9.8%.” Even UPA II fared better as its average growth rate was 7.5% over of NDA’s 7.1 for the past four years.
“The only reason you don’t want to place this data is because UPA’s performance was much better than NDA’s in the past four years and it will blow the canard of policy paralysis,” he said.
Expressing concern over the health of the banking sector, the Congress said that while the UPA government had written off bad loans only to the extent of ₹87,000 crore, the public and private banks had collectively written off ₹3.92 lakh crore in the past four years. On the job front too, the Congress said, while the UPA gave one million jobs in 2009, the NDA had been able to generate only 8.25 lakh. “The current account deficit (CAD) has widened to such an extent that international finance institutions have expressed serious questions ... If there is one number that foreign investors closely watch, it is the CAD,” Mr. Tewari said.