NEW DELHI: A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chief Ministers to strive for double digit growth at the Niti Ayog’s Governing Council meet, the Congress accused his government of “gross economic mismanagement” in the past 48 months and claimed that UPA’s performance 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 reporters.
The Congress posed a series of questions, asking the Modi government to place the revised GDP figures in public domain and clarify “who currently is in charge of Finance Ministry.”
“Why is it that the revised GDP series going back from 2011 have still not been put in the public despite the fact that the base year for calculating the GDP was revised in 2015?” asked Mr. Tewari.
The Congress leader claimed 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%.” He claimed that even UPA II fared better than NDA 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,” alleged Mr. Tewari at the press conference as he gave out comparative data.
Expressing concern over the health of the banking sector, the Congress claimed that while the UPA government had written off bad loans only to the extent of ₹87,000 crore, in the past four years the public and private banks had collectively written off ₹3.92 lakh crore. On the job front too, the Congress claimed, while UPA gave one million jobs in 2009, the NDA has been able to generate only 8.25 lakh jobs as per data released by International Labour Organisation.
“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 CAD,” said Mr. Tewari.