By IANS,
New Delhi : The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Friday played down the row over Chief Economic Adviser Kaushik Basu’s comment on the slow pace of economic reforms, saying reforms are always needed to be done and the government is focussing on bringing the economy back on track.
“We are in the process of putting together the 12th plan and that will lay out a whole five-year programme. But you never finish all the reforms that are needed to be done,” Ahluwalia said.
“There are always reforms that need to be done but that does not mean that you can’t get the economy back on high growth path and that is what we should be focussing on at the moment,” Ahluwalia said when asked by the media to comment on Basu’s remarks that major reforms would not be easy till the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
In Washington to attend the Annual Spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, Basu was addressing the concerns expressed by the US corporates on the Indian government’s reluctance to initiate the series of next phase of reforms. At a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Bsu said major economic reforms were unlikely to happen before the next parliamentary elections.
“You would see a rush of important reforms” after 2015 and India would be one of the “fastest growing” economies of the world, he said.
Ahluwalia said the government should instil confidence in investors that there was going to be an investor-friendly environment where investment could take place and to address some of the many impediments, particularly in the infrastructure sector, energy, power and fuel supply.
“These things are holding up the movement forward of some very large projects and I believe that if we can do that and these people see that this economy is getting back to something like seven and a half percent or so in this fiscal I mean there will be a lot of revival of confidence.
“of course, we have to do a lot of reforms,” said Ahluwalia.