UPA compromised with the fiscal discipline: Jaitley

Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday hit out at the Congress claim that “official figures” on the GDP back series show UPA years in a better light than the NDA and alleged that instead of the UPA “seriously compromised” the fiscal discipline and increased the spending much more than the revenue.

Hours after former finance minister P Chidambaram took on the Centre asserting that best economic growth was under the UPA rule between 2004 and 2014, Jaitley reminded him that UPA government had inherited 8 8% plus growing economy from the NDA and stressed that the growth during UPA-1 was during the period of the global boom.

He also seemed to negate Chidambaram’s definition of “official figures” of GDP back series.

“The Central Statistical Organisation office has been working on the back-series of GDP numbers from 1993-94 to 2011-12. The numbers which have been put out on the website, I understand, are yet to be approved by the Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics. Once that is done, they could be treated as officially approved,” Jaitley said.

Regarding Chidambaram's comparison of growth during the UPA, the Union minister said that in the global context all economies were growing during the boom years, which was not peculiar only to India. He said that the economy later slowed down after the boom years and thereafter.

“However, post-2014, when the global economy was in slowdown mode, it was India and India alone which has been the fastest growing economy in the world for the last four years and has consistently overtaken China in the growth rate,” he said Modi government’s track record on the economy.

Jaitley alleged that when the challenge emerged, the UPA government “compromised on all macro fundamentals.”

“It compromised on the fiscal deficit and the Current Account Deficit, it allowed inflation to spiral out of control and more so to create an illusory growth, it compromised India’s banking system through reckless lending,” Jaitley said.