JOIN US Days after his Budget led to a debate on the government shifting focus from pro-reform to pro-poor, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday said the ongoing debate was erroneous.
All allocations for rural areas such as rural roads will ultimately lead to reforms, he said at the Skoch event here. “As the economy grows faster, people get more jobs, wealth is generated, people are pulled out of poverty lines and then a resource-full state is able to generate a lot of anti-poverty programmes,” he said, adding if India continued to follow the reforms path, it will probably be able to write a new chapter in that history.
The finance minister said the world was no longer ridiculing India of Hindu rate of growth.
“Right till about 40 years of independence, India was growing at about paltry 2% to 2.5%. The world was ridiculing us and the Indian economy, and its growth was referred to globally as the Hindu rate of growth. So, anybody who grew slowly and was satisfied with that growth level was sarcastically referred to as Hindu rate of growth,” Jaitley said.
The FM said that even a few years ago, India started going back to the pre-1991 days, where sloganeering was given more priority over growth.
Jaitley’s third Budget this year was criticised as shifting focus from pro-business to pro-poor ahead of Assembly elections in five major states.