Jubilee Post News & Views
Utkarsh Sinha
It isn’t long back that India announced a 5-trillion economy target and this news had hogged headlines for weeks together. The government representatives and supporters made the news hover in debates but today they are silent when the economic front has some bad feedback.
The announcement on Friday that the GDP shall be 4.2 for the fiscal 2019-20 had the mainstream media too missing over it. No big debate has taken place. The experts had no idea of GDP staying at 4.2 as a little before this they had announced that the GDP shall remain at 5%.
But the fresh statistics tell that in the past four years our GDP has gone down to half and this has no connection with the coronavirus as the data is of the period before the lockdown. When Narendra Modi was completing his first term’s one year the GDP was rising at 8.2% and the next year a fall was recorded.
IN 2016-17 it came down to 7.2 and in 2017-18 the growth rate came down and the GDP came at 6.7%. Further in 2018-19 it came down to 6.1% and in 2019020 it went down steepest to 4.2%.
This means the tall claims of the government for development have gone for a toss and the ddream for a 5 trillion economy has gone far away. If we look at the statistics telling development index for every three months the worries will be seen here too. India’s GDP has been falling straight for the past 9 quarters and according to the last quarter it is at 3.1.
Senior economist Manish Hindvi says economy has been falling for past several quarters and for the past two years there was a clear slowdown but the government was not ready to accept. Ever since BJP took over in 2014 work began to change economic structure without changing the basic infrastructure, and the result was a big section was closed. Two major faults were poor implementation of the demonetization and GST. This brought down the Indian economy from tracks.
Manish Hindvi tells in details the reasons behind. He said poor condition of banks is yet another factor. The government has a problem of not identifying or accepting the basic problem and then what they do makes the problem even bigger. The recent example for this is of relief package. The government paid attention to cheap publicity instead of solving the basic problem.
Majority of those in the knowledge of economic policy say the same. They say during the Narendra Modi government good economists from RBI and Niti Aypg have walked out. Starting from Raghuram Rajan it reached such an extent that the reigns of the RBI is for the first time in hands of a bureaucrat.
Critic Girish Malviya writes in each three month quarter the results showed poor and the government ignoring all kept on saying we shall overcome in the next quarter and each time it was said that the fall wont go beyond. Hence the next quarter will take it up. When the finance minister Nirmala Sitaraman was asked she said the economy is slow but it is not slowdown.
Girish Malviya says when in coronavirus times states expect support from the centre the centre is even postponing the states share in the GST. The state is such that state governments are asking for GST share and the centre is not listening.
Malviya holds the policies of the Modi government responsible. He says in 2008-09 there was global slowdown but India was not in the grip of it. But the economic crisis the government has brought during the coronavirus period it has resulted in to biggest losses among all other countries. And if the losses are recorded India might go from 4.2 to negative say a big rating agency of the world.
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also read : Nehru’s romantic affair with “Gori” Edwina and hypocrisy of Indian Politics
Narandra Modi branding was on development but now only talks are there on development and no results are seen on the ground. When Modi 2.0 is celebrating first year of the term in office then worries have gone up whether India has fallen in to the trap of economic slowdown?
