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We need to improve quality of politics, avoid populism: Jaitley
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SME Times News Bureau | 30 Jan, 2016
Asserting that India's current growth rate was below its potential,
union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday hit out against those
opposing the government's reform measures in parliament, saying they
were "hurting India's credibility".
Delivering the inaugural
Suresh Neotia lecture here, he also stressed on improving quality of
politics and avoiding policy diversion in the form of populism.
"Those
who play games in parliament, must eventually realise that they are not
only stalling the growth process of the country, but actually hurting
India's credibility," said Jaitley.
Speaking about Vision for
India 2020, he blamed the successive Congress regimes' "penchant for
regulation" and described the period between 1970 and 1990 as the
"wasted decades".
Observing that the constituency of those
supporting reforms even in the political spectrum was growing, Jaitley
said India needed to speak largely in one voice on maintaining the
growth momentum so as to give out the right signals that the country is
capable of achieving the goals it has set out to achieve.
"So
whenever in the next session (of parliament) important legislations - be
it direct tax reforms or indirect tax reforms - they come up, of
whatever importance they are to growth of the economy, it's important to
establish the country's credibility we have to maintain that momentum
of growth.
"Those who now try and stall these (reforms), their
figure itself is narrowing. Not only is it contracting, to the substance
of obstruction, there is lot of public outcry against them," he said.
With
India being referred as the "sweet spot" amid the global meltdown,
Jaitley asserted the country had the potential to achieve a growth rate
in excess of the current 7-7.5 percent and called for improving rural
demand and faster growth in manufacturing.
"We are no more
satisfied with just being the global sweet spot because we know the
current 7-7.5 percent growth rate is still below our potential.
"Therefore
we have to move in a direction in which these demands expand and
economic activity expands," he said, also adding that to achieve these
objectives, the quality of politics has to go up.
"We need to
really concentrate on two important factors - one is improving the
quality of politics. World's largest democracy can't function unless it
has a high level of politics.
"Post 1991, we have seen
proliferation of caste based and family based political parties. There
are 15 families which now control the balance of power in India," he
said.
"We need to avoid policy diversions, populism is a policy
diversion. Populism in terms of social issues, religious or caste
issues, in terms of abandoning sound economic roadmap, all become a
policy diversion," said Jaitley.
Even as he praised the states
for their bid to attract investments and harped on the changing the
idiom of politics across the country, Jaitley mocked the economic
policies of the CPI-M led Left.
"Even states like Jharkhand are
revenue surplus. There are two mainstream states in the country which
are revenue deficit- West Bengal and Kerala. You don't require rocket
science to know what is the commonality between these two states," he
said in an obvious reference to the Left which had been in power in
these two states.
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