(LiveMint)
The Indian economy was in a much worse state than believed when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power, but the government decided not to bring out a tell-all white paper on the state of the economy to avoid further deepening the crisis even though it politically damaged the government, prime minister Narendra Modi said in an interview . “The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the budget figures were suspicious,” Modi said in an interview with Swarajya magazine as published on its website.
Modi came to power in 2014 alleging economic mismanagement by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. Modi, in the interview, said it was ironic that the economy worsened under an ‘economist’ prime minister (Manmohan Singh) and a ‘know-it-all’ finance minister (P. Chidambaram). He reminded that India was among the Fragile Five economies in 2014 and that experts believed that the ‘I’ in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) would collapse. “Now, in the midst of this, imagine a white paper coming out, giving intricate details of the extent of damage. Instead of being a mollifier, it would have been a multiplier of the distress,” Modi said.
