'Our nine-year show will bring us back to power'

As President [Pranab Mukherjee] mentioned in the initial parts of his address, our economy has faced a difficult situation in the past one year. The members are aware that our growth has slowed down and the fiscal deficit has risen. Inflation has been a persistent problem in the last two years. The current account deficit is substantially higher than what we would like it to be. The finance minister has dealt with all these issues in his Budget speech, and before that the Economic Survey tabled in this House gave a fairly comprehensive picture of the state of the economy. I would, therefore, be brief in speaking about the challenges that confront our economy and what we need to do to overcome them.

However, I do wish to emphatically endorse the view of the finance minister that the slowdown in the economy need not persist, and that we are fully capable of putting the country back on a high growth path of seven to eight per cent per annum in the next two to three years. To achieve this, we need to increase the rate of investment, especially in infrastructure. Our effort, therefore, will be to raise domestic savings, contain the growth of subsidies and encourage private investment. While our aim is to achieve an average GDP [gross domestic product] growth of eight per cent during the 12th Plan and agricultural growth of four per cent, the focus will continue to remain on inclusive growth.

Inclusive growth implies not only reducing poverty, but also improving regional equality across and within states, uplift of the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes and minorities, closing gender gaps and generating more and better employment opportunities. Our policies have been designed to fulfil these objectives.

I listened with great interest to the speech of Rajnath Singh, and the best I can do is to compare the nine years of UPA [United Progressive Alliance] rule with the six years of NDA [National Democratic Alliance] rule, so that our men and women can draw a proper appreciation of what has been done in these nine years. First, I take the growth of GDP. If you look at the period of nine years, including the current period of slowdown, our average growth rate in these nine years will be 7.9 per cent. As against this, the NDA's six years yield no more than six per cent.

It is true that growth in 2012 has slowed down, but nowhere else this growth-profile is in an upward direction. Europe is in recession, the US' growth rate is low; Japan is stagnating; Brazil's growth rate is less than two per cent; South Africa's growth rate is 2.3 per cent, and in the light of the prevailing global situation, our growth rate looks to be impressive even though we are not satisfied with it.

Inclusiveness of the growth process can be judged in many ways. The first and foremost is the concern with the well-being of our farmers; what happens to agricultural production, and as I said earlier, from 2004-05 to 2011-12, i.e. the UPA period, the growth rate of agricultural production and allied activities was 3.7 per cent. The corresponding growth rate from 1998-99 to 2003-04 of the NDA period was no more than 2.9 per cent. Because agriculture has grown at a faster rate, also because of a number of inclusive policies put in place by our government, like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the per capita consumption in rural areas during the UPA period is 3.4 per cent. In the NDA period, the per capita rural consumption was no more than 0.8 per cent.

I come now to real wages in agriculture. Real wages in agriculture in the 11th Plan have grown at an average annual rate of 6.8 per cent. In the last decade, the growth rate of real wages in agriculture was no more than 1.1 per cent.

With regard to poverty, in the UPA period, the poverty declined at an average annual rate of two per cent per annum. In the preceding 10 years, the decline was no more than 0.8 per cent. We are all concerned about the slowdown in industry. But when we compare the nine-year period in which the UPA has been in power, our industrial growth rate average is 8.5 per cent; the corresponding average for the NDA from 1998-99 to 2003-04 is no more than 5.6 per cent...

With regard to health, the National Rural Health Mission has made a very important start. The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana is a huge UPA initiative, and it provides in-patient cover to 3.4 crores of families. The infant mortality rate has fallen from 58 to 44. The maternal mortality rate has fallen from 254 to 212. The life expectancy at birth was in 2000-01, 62.5 years, and by 2010-11 of this century, it has gone up to 66 years. Literacy rate, similarly, has gone up from 64.8 to 74 per cent. The death rate has declined from 8.4 per cent to 7.1 per cent.

It is not my case that what we have achieved is the optimum level. I do recognise that growth requires efforts and further efforts to boost it - we need to do lot more to promote inclusiveness - that health and education require greater attention, that environment protection measures have to be adopted with greater amount of firmness. But I would respectfully submit to this august House that what has been achieved is not something that can be belittled as Rajnath Singh tried to do.

I know that the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] has a particular view towards economic and social policy of the UPA. A few days ago, a conclave of the National Council of the BJP assembled in Delhi, used the choicest abuses for the Congress establishment and Congress leadership, including myself. It is not my intention to reply them in that language because I do believe that our work and our performance are the best judges of what we have achieved.

We have seen this arrogance not for the first time. The "India Shining" campaign in 2004 led to disastrous results for the BJP. In 2009, they fielded the iron man, L K Advani, against the lamb that Manmohan Singh is, and we all know as to what was the result. I am convinced that if the people of India were to look at our record in these nine or 10 years, they would repeat what they did in 2004 and 2009.

Edited excerpts from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's reply to the motion of thanks on the President's address in the Lok Sabha in New Delhi on March 6