Letters: Cautious on targets

This refers to the editorial "Thinking big" (July 7). While inheriting a sluggish economy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team seem committed to leave no stone unturned to turn around the economy. However, while fixing goals, the team, particularly the leader, needs to think and examine the availability of supporting factors to ensure achievement of set goals on time.

At a time when many of the announcements are yet to take off, the PM and the government need to rapidly implement reforms to instil confidence to attract more inflow of investments and to prevent flight of capital from the market. The government needs to take greater care to keep away from populist announcements, to avoid the inherent demerit of public losing faith even at a slight failure.

While ambitious goals must have to be set to push ministries to work hard, unrealistic goals will force the team to abandon the set targets midway, which will lead to blocking of investments and losing of faith of investors. For instance, providing 20 million and 40 million affordable housing units in urban and rural India respectively in seven years seems to be over- ambitious, as it involves many time-consuming issues such as clearance from multiple authorities, acquisition of land and development of other supportive infrastructure.

V S K Pillai, Kottayam

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