NEW DELHI: Days after severe criticism of the government and BJP leadership on nosedive decline in growth rate and especially owing to noteban, BJP chief Amit Shah today said the Narendra Modi government changed the approach to growth by making better standards of living the priority.
“If every house has a toilet, electricity and LPG cylinder will GDP increase or not?,” Mr Shah put the poser at a session organised by business chamber FICCI. With regard the demonetisation move slapped from November 8, 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said: “A lot can be argued after RBI released the data. But I truly believe that formal economy has grown due to demonetisation. We haven’t taken decisions keeping any vote bank in mind”.
He further said the BJP-led dispensation has also “risked political setbacks”.
“Now, the money has come back into the system. Income tax officials will continue with their efforts. But the money which was lying in the lockers, safes and warehouses is being used for the welfare of the country,” he said.
Mr Shah’s candid remarks come close on the heels of severe attack from Congress and other opposition parties. In fact, the Modi Government sustained jolts when RBI annual report showed that the bold move of demonetisation did not go as planned, while the GDP data showed that growth rate declined to 5.7 per cent for the March-June 2017 quarter.
It was 7.9 per cent the corresponding quarter last fiscal. Worse for the Modi government and BJP, the decline in growth rate post-demonetisation has only endorsed former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s prediction. After recording good growth rate by the end of 2015, since January-March 2016 quarter, the GDP growth rate has been continuously declining.
In his address to the FICCI audience, Amit Shah said the Modi Government is in effect focusing on long-term gains rather than short-term benefits.
“While Government has created ‘Brand India’, it is now for the Indian industry to cash in on the high pedestal that the economy has been placed,” he said.
He said, hiding NPAs or balance sheet jugglery will not benefit anyone and maintained that cleaning bank balance sheets is a vital necessity. “No political leader has done more to deal with bad loans than Narendra Modi. Benefits of the bad loan battle will be visible in the next 5-10 years,” he said adding, “we will find a solution to the NPA problem.
We will sit with industry, banks and states. But there was no point of concealing NPA”. “Cleaning banks’ balance sheets has been one of the greatest achievements of the Modi government,” he said. “We have delinked development agenda from vote bank pressures,” Mr Shah said. (AGENCIES)
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