The Narendra Modi-led government has announced a slew of measures to spur economic growth including bank mergers and financial support for public sector banks and HFCs. To instil confidence in investors the government withdrew additional surcharge on foreign portfolio investors and decided to make CSR violations a civil offence rather than a criminal one.
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CNBC-TV18 spoke to Soumya Kanti Ghosh, group chief economic advisor at State Bank of India, R Nagaraj, professor at IGIDR, Narendra Taneja, spokesperson of BJP, and Pawan Khera, spokesperson of Congress, to understand whether these measures are enough to revive market sentiments.
Ghosh said the country was going through challenging times. "We are in a synchronised slowdown; basically India is not immune to the global slowdown. Instead of saying it is structural and cyclical, I would like to say it is a demand and supply shock. So, currently we are in the midst of a synchronised demand slowdown as we see across all economies around the world," he observed.
Nagaraj does not agree with the government's view that the slowdown is a short term issue. "Just to give an idea, savings and investments which are the motors of any economic growth anywhere, have declined from 36 and 39 percent in 2011-2012 to 29 and 30 percent at present. This kind of slowdown takes a long time to revive. Unless your domestic savings and domestic investments increase back to the level we had seen in the last decade, we will not get the kind of growth rates we got in the last decade. Therefore I see it as a long term issue and in my view the government is still not serious enough to address it," he said.
Defending the measures taken by the government, Taneja said the challenges are being addressed on real time basis. "Economy is a dynamic process, so we are addressing issues. You have seen it already in terms of taxes, bank consolidation and so many other things. Wherever we find that we need to do more, we will do it. We have shared our goal with the people of this country; we want $5 trillion economy by 2024. Whatever is required we will do it," he stated.
Khera said the government believed in startling people. "This is a government which is obsessed with the speed of bullet trains, the size of a statue, the number of bills passed -- how they pass the bills is not something they would like to discuss with anyone at all. No standing committee matters to them, no select committee matters to them, no discussions in the parliament matter to them. The procedure adopted while passing a bill, while taking a decision in a country as large as this - consensus is the answer. You cannot startle people and put them behind their own doors and lock the doors from outside and say all is well. Please do not internationalise Kashmir, make sure that Kashmir remains an internal matter of India, please thwart every attempt made by a rogue nation in our neighbourhood to internationalise it," he said.