India needs a strong and decisive government if economic growth has to be sustained, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, citing the swift manner in which the NDA government prevented the IL&FS issue from spreading as an example of decisive governance.
High trajectory
“If this path of high growth trajectory is to continue… what does India need,” Mr. Jaitley said at an Assocham event. “India needs a decisive and strong leadership at the Centre. A weak leadership, within days of the crisis, could not have handled IL&FS the way the present government did. And therefore, a crisis in the making was handled with swiftness, is just one of the ways in which this government has been acting.”
“You need a government which has a coherent policy that is absolutely clear about the direction in which it is going to move,” Mr. Jaitley added. “After a series of reforms in the post 1991 period, we saw a slowdown in the reforms momentum,” Mr. Jaitley said. “Therefore, the second generation of reforms had to be made. India aspires to be a developed economy, which has a huge aspirational population, has to get out of the stigma of unfairness and corruption.”
“The system had to be cleaned up and therefore each one of our reforms and administrative practices was to create a situation where those who display entrepreneurship and want to create wealth for India have a right to be left alone,” he added.