UPA tenure lost decade, India's growth not arithmetic inevitability: FM

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that India becoming the third-biggest economy is not an arithmetic inevitability but requires efforts and a visionary leader to accomplish it.

Countering the recent remarks made by former finance minister (FM) P Chidambaram, Sitharaman said, “Nothing grows automatically. It is effort that makes it grow. Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi guarantees that with good and clean administration, he will ensure that India reaches the third rank. So it is not an arithmetic inevitability.”

Chidambaram recently told PTI that India will become the third-largest economy in the world regardless of who becomes the PM. He said that India would achieve the third position given the size of its population, and there was “no magic” involved in it.

Calling the 10 years of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) tenure India’s lost decade because of bad policies and corruption, Sitharaman said growth in gross domestic product (GDP) does not happen automatically and requires a lot of effort at the macro and micro level.

“Unless GDP is widened or grown, you're not going to be able to meet the demands of the economy.”

Referring to comments by “a former finance minister,” Sitharaman said, “No magic is involved. Then why was there a roller coaster ride? No magic is involved, and given that our population will anyway grow inevitably, why did we dip and rise and dip and rise?”
 

She said that India’s position in the world improved by two ranks, from 12th place in 2004 to 10th place in 2014.

“We notched just two points up in 10 years after PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee left. From the 10th rank, we have reached the fifth rank in 10 years, and within two more, probably, it will go up to the third rank,” Sitharaman said.

GDP is currently ranked fifth, after the US, China, Germany, and Japan.

Speaking at the Viksit Bharat Ambassador Campus Dialogue at Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management in Visakhapatnam, Sitharaman compared the two crises faced by the UPA and National Democratic Alliance administrations during the past 10 years. She said that the global financial crisis in 2008–09 was not felt across the globe, unlike the pandemic in 2020.

“Despite the pandemic, we were able to reach the fifth place. The visionary PM will ensure that corruption doesn’t eat into the goodwill and the earnings of the common man,” Sitharaman said.