Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday that if the estimates of India’s GDP that the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has revised show that growth during the UPA government’s last year was 6.9 per cent rather than 4.7 per cent then it was right.
Replying to a debate on the Appropriation Bill 2015-16, in the Rajya Sabha, Mr. Jaitley said that the CSO was an independent organisation unaffected by whether a UPA or an NDA government was in office. The Bill was later approved by a voice vote, marking completion of the first phase of the budgetary exercise.
The Finance Minister’s intervention in Parliament marks a significant change of stand of the Modi government about the economic performance of the Manmohan Singh government.
It also puts to rest the controversy Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian raised last month by calling the CSO’s revision of the growth estimate for what was the UPA Government’s last year in office ‘puzzling’. The estimate growth for the first year of the Modi government of 7.4 per cent he said he was quite alright with.
Mr. Jaitley said that auctioning coal mines was in fact the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s proposal. “In 2004, two months after taking over as the Prime Minister, Dr. Saheb said coal mines must be auctioned which clearly indicates he was not comfortable with discretionary allocations but he couldn’t put this in to action till 2014,” he said.
The Modi government was just trying to get rid of discretions in the allocation process, he said. “Don’t obstruct implementation of your policies…please rethink your strategy of the day.”
Referring to the former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s columns, Mr. Jaitley said that his predecessor ( Chidambaram) has been kinder to him (Mr. Jaitley) than his own predecessor now President Pranab Mukherjee.
Mr. Chidambaram in his response to the CSO’s revised estimates said that the data released showed that the 10 years of the UPA government recorded the highest decadal growth since Independence. “The data released…should put an end, once and for all time, to the misconceived charge that the UPA Government had mismanaged the economy.”
