Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman speaks in the Rajya Sabha throughout the Budget session of Parliament, in New Delhi on Febuary 10, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI
The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) squandered the alternative to implement the unfinished reforms agenda from 1991 throughout its decade in workplace, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioned in the Rajya Sabha on Saturday, accusing the Manmohan Singh authorities of “thorough mismanagement” after the world monetary disaster.
Citing a Tamil proverb “Mullu Mel Potta Thuni Mathiri” (Like a material positioned on thorns) in response to a dialogue on the White Paper on the Economy, Ms. Sitharaman mentioned the Narendra Modi authorities needed to fastidiously extricate India’s economic system out of the thorns the UPA had tangled it in, with out ripping its material.
“The economy was like a piece of cloth on that thorny bush, the thorns were all those malpractices that had torn into the economy. The whole world was using the phrase Fragile Five for all of us. What was the level of fragility? From the bottom, you were within the first five,” she mentioned.
“After all, you [UPA] inherited a very good economy from the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. And maybe in your first five years, you tried benefiting the people with that good economy. But subsequently, and unfortunately, after the global financial crisis, it was thorough mismanagement,” the Minister mentioned.
Stressing that the White Paper was being introduced out now “after 10 years of toiling to bring the economy back on track”, Ms. Sitharaman mentioned it might serve as a document for posterity, when the intent was not good and transparency was not there in the economic system. “We need to have clean and accountable governance, not governance through extra-constitutional bodies,” she remarked.
She reminded the House that the first Cabinet selections underneath Mr. Modi had been the formation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to take away black cash and the Expenditure Reforms Commission underneath Bimal Jalan “so that profligate expenditure of the earlier government could be rationalised”.
Referring to former PM Singh, Ms. Sitharaman mentioned that the “promised reforms of 1991 were not complete and “when there was an opportunity again between 2004 and 2014, no reforms” had been undertaken.
“It is one thing to continuously tell us what have you done… What have you done on the two-track approach, which is required for the train to go forward, one to remove the malpractices’ impact on the economy and to not only carry forward those pending reforms, which have been waiting from 1991, but also even further to take the economy forward. So, that is the track which we laid for ourselves,” she mentioned.
Dismissing Congress MP Okay.C. Venugopal’s cost that the demonetisation of high-value foreign money notes in late 2016 had worn out India’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the Minister mentioned as many as 3.16 crore MSMEs had been registered on the Udyam platform as of December 4, 2023, and urged the Opposition to do “some more homework”.
