Congress leader and member of the standing committee on Finance, Manish Tewari, in a letter to panel chairperson Jayant Sinha, has urged him to discuss “the current state of Indian economy” instead of its present agenda to deliberate on “financing the innovation ecosystem and India’s growth companies” for a meeting scheduled for July 28.
Mr. Tewari wrote that while it is appreciable to be aspirational but given the economic environment, people should not conclude that the Standing Committee of Finance is “delusional”.
Also read | Number of COVID-19 cases in India crosses million mark
He said the assumptions and projections made in the Union Budget passed on March 23 before the country went into a lockdown no longer stood.
“Unfortunately in the past 116 days, economists became epidemiologists and epidemiologists became economists while the former could not flatten the disease curve the latter flattened the economy,” he said. Mr. Tewari added that all independent estimates suggest that Indian economy would grow at a rate between -7.3% to -3.2% in the current fiscal.
The economic fallout of COVID-19
“I think we owe it to the country to get ‘real’ at this point of time and look out for the welfare of our 130 crore countrymen rather than some fat-cat oligarchs and capitalists,” Mr. Tewari said.
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