Bolder reforms will take time, says Jaitley

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday hinted that bolder reforms would take time. He said his agenda in this regard is full for one or two years, and tougher decisions which would require larger consensus would come after that.

Meanwhile, former finance minister P Chidambaram said 2G licences should have been cancelled as soon as the process of their allocation was exposed to be a scam.

Jaitley was speaking at a programme organised to release Rajdeep Sardesai’s book “2014: The Election That Changed India”. He said second-generation reforms would certainly be pursued, and the easier ones would come first.

Chidambaram, who also attended the event, accused the Narendra Modi-led government of promising more than what it could do. He said it had taken no big decision. He also lamented that if the Congress had the kind of majority the Modi government has, he would have taken some more bold decisions, referring to the issue of retrospective tax.