The GDP growth rate has slumped to 5% under the present NDA Government, which is the lowest in the last six years, senior Congress leader M.M. Pallam Raju has said.
Addressing the media here on Saturday, Mr. Raju said that the IMF, Fitch, World Bank, Moody’s and even the RBI had cut India’s growth forecast. “From being the fifth largest economy, India dropped to the seventh position. This is because of the lopsided economic policies of the Centre,” he added.
Unemployment
Quoting NSSO, he pointed out that unemployment had reached an all-time high in the last 45 years.
“When the global unemployment rate is 4.95%, the rate in India is 8.5%,” he said.
Coming down heavily on the BJP-led government at the Centre, the former Union Minister said, “New private investment has hit a 16-year low, household savings have fallen to the lowest in 20 years and the overall savings have fallen from 34.6% to 30%. Industrial growth has hit a seven- year low and core sector growth is the lowest in 14 years.”
“The banking sector is in a bad shape. The government should have taken the advice of former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan seriously,” Mr. Raju said. “The former RBI Governor had called for reorganising the banking sector, which the Centre did not heed to. And now, bank NPAs have crossed the ₹8 lakh crore-mark. During the last five years, 25,000 cases of bank frauds have been recorded,” he said. Calling GST implementation a failure, Mr. Raju said the Centre’s gross tax revenue was likely to have a shortfall of about ₹2 lakh crore and the government might end up with a fiscal deficit of around 4%.
He also said that contribution of agriculture to the GDP slipped to a mere 2% in the first quarter of the fiscal. On the Prime Minister’s dream of making India a 5 trillion USD economy, he said to achieve it the government should go for structural reforms.
Ayodhya case
On the Supreme Court’s verdict on Ayodhya case, he said, “Though the Congress has been accused of being a minority appeasement party, our core tenet has been secularism and we will respect the verdict.”
