Union Minister Arun Jaitley has underplayed the revised growth projections of the UPA regime by stating that the increase was in line with the boom in the global economy during that period.

“It would thus be seen that in the global context all economies were growing during the boom years, which was not peculiar only to India. It slowed down after the boom years and thereafter,” Jaitley said in his Facebook post on Sunday.

Overtakes China

Defending the economic performance of the BJP-led government, he said that after 2014, when the global economy was in slowdown mode, it was “India and India alone”, which was the fastest-growing economy in the world and had consistently overtaken China in economic growth rate.

The Central Statistical Organisation office has been working on the back-series of GDP numbers from 1993-94 to 2011-12.

“The numbers, which have been put out on the website, I understand, are yet to be approved by the Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics. Once that is done, they could be treated as officially approved,” he said.

According to back series calculations by a committee appointed by the National Statistical Commission, the Indian economy grew 10.23 per cent in 2007-08 and 10.78 per cent in 2010-11 during the UPA regime under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The Minister said that the analysis of the numbers put up (a tentative view of one expert group) indicated that the GDP at market prices and GDP at factor cost in the back-casted series was systematically lower than the old series from 1994-95 till 2002-03. However, it was higher from 2003-04 till 2011-12.

“The new series figures are already available after this period. This dichotomy could happen because of the formula used and I am sure the experts looking into the subject would scrutinise this,” he said.

For India to grow at a high rate during 2003-08 was quite obvious, Jaitley said. “The NDA government, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, went out of office in 2004 leaving behind an 8 per cent-plus growth rate. Additionally, in 2004, the government had the benefit of continuous incremental reforms from 1991 to 2004. The global tailwinds strongly supported growth.

“Since demand was high, exports were growing, and, therefore, for an emerging economy like India, it was a great opportunity. There were no significant domestic reforms carried out during this period,” he said.

However, when this honeymoon ended, growth started slipping, and to ensure that growth was maintained, two significant steps were taken: First, fiscal discipline was compromised and the banking system was advised to go in for reckless lending notwithstanding the fact that it would eventually put the banks at a risk.

“And yet when the UPA moved out of power in 2014, the last three-year record, even in terms of growth, was less than modest,” he said.

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