Moving ahead on the announcement made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Interim Budget 2024-25, the government will soon come out with a White Paper on the Indian economy. The White Paper could be released as early as the next two weeks, according to government sources.
“In 2014, when our Government assumed the reins, the responsibility to mend the economy step by step and to put the governance systems in order was enormous. The need of the hour was to give hope to the people, to attract investments, and to build support for the much-needed reforms,” Sitharaman said in her Budget speech on February 1.
“The government did that successfully following our strong belief of ‘nation-first’. The crisis of those years has been overcome, and the economy has been put firmly on a highly sustainable growth path with all-round development. It is now appropriate to look at where we were then till 2014 and where we are now, only to draw lessons from the mismanagement of those years. The government will lay a White Paper on the table of the House,” She added.
A government source said the finance ministry is working on the White Paper. “The White Paper on the economy should be released within the next two weeks,” said another source. Ahead of the general elections, which may be announced by the first week of March, the White Paper is likely to stoke a political storm with the comparative analysis of the 10 years of the Modi regime with the previous 10 years of UPA rule led by former PM Manmohan Singh.
It also shows the Modi government’s confidence on the macroeconomic management front before going into the elections, which of course will find a pitch in the BJP’s canvassing and campaigns for seeking votes.
In contrast, the UPA’s terminal years witnessed widespread policy paralysis, stymied economic growth, a long spell of high food and retail inflation, and an unprecedented depreciation of the rupee due to the tapering of the quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve, which caught the North Block mandarins completely off guard. A White Paper on the economy also means that the BJP plans to go to the electorates with an agenda of economic growth, which did not find much mention in the campaign pitch of the party in 2019, as national security issues in the wake of Pulwama attack took centre stage.
