'UPA-made' economic 'calamity' has lost control: BJP

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday blamed the Congress-led UPA Government for the ongoing economic meltdown in the country, and said the Centre's damage control policies have come a little too late.

"This is not the natural calamity. This is a man-made crisis and this is a UPA-made crisis-Manmohan Singh and his team is entirely responsible. Congress is responsible for the present state of affairs. They not only seem to be clueless, but the situation has also gone out of control. This is happened because of their indecision. They should have taken decisions in time to save the situation on every front," BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said.

"We condemn this government's action, approach, indecision and lack of leadership which has resulted in this precarious situation," he added.

The rupee on Wednesday breached or was close to breaching the 68 mark against the U.S. dollar.

In order to arrest the rupee slide, RBI had announced measures such as restriction on Indian firms investing abroad and on outward remittances by resident Indians, triggering talks of return of capital control regime.

On the same day, during a debate on the economic situation in the Lok Sabha, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram attributed much of the current economic woes to the stimulus provided to help the industry to tide over the problems emanating from the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Chidambaram said: "Fiscal deficit limits had been breached. The CAD had swelled. These were the two main challenges, apart from the number of other challenges that we had to face."

He, however, claimed that situation had improved till the unexpected development on May 22, 2013, when the US Federal Reserve announced tapering of bond purchases which sent the emerging markets in a tizzy.

"In the last 12 months there have been days when I have been more upbeat; days when I been more downcast. But the fact is some stability did return to the economy until a completely unexpectedly unexpected event took place on May 22, 2013", he said.

He attributed tumbling of rupee to that announcement of Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, global ratings agency Fitch on Monday said India's fiscal numbers "look weak" and warned of a downgrade if the country is unable to meet the fiscal deficit target.