“The state of the economy was much worse than expected when BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014. Things were terrible. Even the budget figures were suspicious,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an interview to ‘Swarajya’.
India is now the fastest growing large economy of the world with strong fundamentals to drive further growth, he added.
PM Modi while highlighting the focus on reforming, strengthening and transforming of the Indian economy said, “In 2014, one of the key agendas of the BJP’s election campaign was highlighting the dismal management of the Indian economy, ironically under an economist PM and a know-it-all Finance Minister. We all knew the economy was in the doldrums.”
While highlighting UPA government’s failure under the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Modi said, “In 2014, industry was leaving India. India was in the Fragile Five. Experts believed that the ‘I’ in BRICS would collapse. Public sentiment was that of disappointment. In the midst of this, imagine a White Paper giving intricate details of the extent of damage.”
“We accepted this uncomfortable truth and hit the ground running from the very first day to stabilise things so that the Indian economy can be strengthened for the long haul. We tolerated a number of political allegations, we accepted political damage but ensured no damage to our country,” the Prime Minister added.
He straightway rejected the criticism on jobless growth while saying “We have data put out by state governments on employment. The previous Karnataka government claimed to have created 53 lakh jobs and the West Bengal government created 68 lakh jobs in the last term. Now, if states are all creating good numbers of jobs, is it possible that the country is not creating jobs?”
