BY IANS,
New Delhi: Amid speculation that the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) was finally softening its stance on the Congress, the party mouthpiece has criticised the Manmohan Singh government for its economic policies.
The People’s Democracy, in its latest issue Thursday, faulted the government for not paying heed to the CPI-M suggestion for a quantum leap in public investments to deal with the impact of the global economic recession.
The country is paying a very high cost for the state of denial of both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the impact of the global economic recession, it warned.
“We had argued that unless there is a quantum leap in public investments, domestic demand and employment cannot be shored up. Without this, the economy cannot be stimulated for growth and to prevent the slide to recession. Unfortunately, the Manmohan Singh government has paid little heed to this,” the People’s Democracy said in its editorial.
“We had even stated both on the floor of the parliament and outside that the general elections cannot be used as an excuse to postpone such a decision as this would have damaging and possibly irreversible impact on our economy,” the editorial said.
Quoting the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects (GEP) 2009, the editorial said the global GDP is expected to contract by 1.7 percent this year, which would be the first decline in world output on record.
The GEP says “what began six months ago with a massive de-leveraging in financial markets has turned into one of the sharpest global economic contradictions in modern history”, the editorial said.
The CPI-M said the government’s refusal to sharply increase public investments has had its inevitable effect in the sharp drop in industrial output.
“India’s industrial output dropped to an alarming minus 2.3 percent growth in March 2009. Foreign direct investment (FDI) in India has been estimated to have dropped by over 55 percent – from $4.4 billion in March 2008 to $2 billion in March 2009,” the editorial said.
The CPI-M said people in India need to brace themselves for much harder economic conditions in the near future.
“This can be prevented only by the new government substantially hiking public investment that will generate both employment and demand while, at the same time, building the much needed economic and social infrastructure in the country,” the party said.