Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Saturday hit back at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for claiming that the economy was performing well since the Modi government came to power in 2014.
In a series of tweets, Chidambaram, a former finance minister, argued that the World Bank's former chief economist Kaushik Basu had stated that India's growth rate was lower than the 30-year average.
"FM claims that growth rate is better," Chidambaram exclaimed.
"What is the average of 4 years of NDA? It is 7.3 under new methodology and lower than UPA's 10-year average. What is the direction of NDA's growth rate? Investments? Savings? Credit growth? All downward," the Congress leader said.
Replying to the discussion on the Union Budget in the Rajya Sabha on Friday, Jaitley had said the Indian economy had performed very well since the NDA government took over in May 2014.
"India achieved an average growth of 7.5% in first three years of our government. Indian economy is now 2.5 trillion dollar economy, seventh largest in the world," he had said.
Chidambaram had initiated the discussion on the Budget in the Rajya Sabha accusing the Modi government of throwing fiscal prudence to the wind and making a series of false promises to the people in the Budget with the upcoming elections in mind.
The former finance minister was all praise for Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian by recommending to the government to give top priority to education, employment and agriculture.
"Unfortunately, the chief economic adviser has been a good doctor but the government is a terrible patient. The diagnosis of the doctor is that the patient is very ill, maybe terminally ill," Chidambaram had said.