Will revive expenditure reforms: Yashwant Sinha

Proper expenditure management will be taken up and and not adhoc steps pursued by UPA to reduce fiscal deficit if BJP comes to power, party leader Yashwant Sinha today said.
"We will not take the kind of adhoc steps that this government has taken to contract the expenditure and reduce fiscal deficit. What is needed is proper expenditure management," he said while addressing a conference here.
He said that the next NDA government would call for a detailed examination of all the expenditure after coming to power.
"I can't tell you today, where the reduction will be, what the extent of reduction will be, what will be the quality of expenditure management, expenditure reform is the prime need of the hour," he added.

Attacking UPA government, Sinha alleged that in the last ten years it has done nothing at all by way of expenditure reforms that need to be revived.
He noted that during his tenure as Finance Minister he had appointed the Expenditure Reforms Commission, headed by a former secretary to the government.

Sinha said that the GDP growth rate has registered a mere 4.7 per cent in October-December quarter of 2013-14. Manufacturing and mining registered a decline of 1.9 per cent and 1.6 per cent during the quarter.
He posed 18 questions to Finance Minister P Chidambaram including on price rise, economic growth and job fronts.

He claimed that the high economic growth rate witnessed in the first four years of UPA-I (2004-2007) was largely on account of measures initiated by the NDA government and not because of any steps taken by UPA governments.