NEW DELHI, Feb 4:Describing the NDA as a ‘terrible patient ‘ which had refused to heed the ‘diagnosis’ given by the Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Sunday said the government continued to be in a denial about the economic situation in the country.
Mr Chidambaram in a series of tweets said, ”The government continues to be in denial. It denies the objective situation in the economy. It denies farm distress. It denies joblessness. It denies the arguments of the Opposition. Now, it denies the suggestions of CEA appointed in 2014.”
Noting that the Budget was the occasion to outline the reforms and set a schedule, Mr Chidambaram said, ”instead, what we got was Elizabethan prose about “an ambitious reform agenda under the rubric of an Enhanced Access and Service Excellence (EASE) programme”.
”In the Budget, the Finance Minister did not even acknowledge the worrying situation of savings and investments,” he said.
Mr Chidambaram said that while the Economic Survey (ES) emphasized the four ‘R’s (Recognition, Resolution, Recapitalisation and Reforms), it pointed out that, although the first three had been done, banking reforms had not been undertaken.
”A modest rise in exports in recent months may have made the Government complacent. There are no grounds for complacency because merchandise exports have barely come back to the level of a few years ago,” former Finance Minister said.
”Its striking that the ES pointed out that the Centre’s tax-GDP ratio is no higher than it was in the 1980s” and observed, after demonetisation and the GST, it would be interesting to see how good the collections have been and also the projections for the next year,” Mr Chidambaram said.
(UNI)
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