Demonetisation biggest contributor to fall in GDP: AAP

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday blamed the demonetisation move of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre for the fall in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and demanded a white paper on the note ban.

Senior AAP leader Dilip Pandey said that scrapping currency notes was the biggest contributor to the negative GDP growth and asked the central government to apologise for "cheating" people in the name of demonetisation.

On Wednesday, data released by the official statistician showed that the GDP, a measuring scale of a country's economic growth, grew at 6.1 per cent in the fourth and last quarter of the 2016-17 financial year, down from 7.1 per cent in the third quarter.

Also, India's GDP during 2016-17 financial year grew at 7.1 per cent, which is lower than 8 per cent in 2015-16.

"Even after all efforts and even after changing the calculation of WPI (Wholesale Price Indices) and IIP (Index of Industrial Production), they (central government) couldn't present a good picture of the financial situation of the country, and it is further deteriorating," Pandey said.

The leader alleged that the central government was hiding the truth behind demonetisation and that the work to print new notes was given to a blacklisted company, whose name had featured in the Panama Papers.

"Just as the truth about economic development has come out now, the truth about demonetisation will also come out one day," he said.

The AAP leader said that many economists around the world had concluded that the biggest contributor for fall in the GDP was demonetisation.

"Now Arun Jaitley can no longer say it is due to global economic fluctuations or financial mismanagement under the UPA regime," he added.

--IANS

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