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Come out of paralysis, banks told
By Our Special Correspondent
The Union Finance Minister, Jaswant Singh, and the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, at the valedictory session of the 9th Partnership Summit 2003 in Hyderabad on Wednesday. — Photo: H. Satish
It will signal the announcement of a series of decisions by the Government of India touching upon various economic sectors from January 9 till the first week of February, Mr. Singh said at the ninth Partnership Summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here today.
Delivering the valedictory address, he said the Government had already taken important decisions on the steel industry — which he would leave to the Boards concerned to announce — and on debt swapping and debt amortisation.
Responding to a plea by the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, for introducing an open sky policy to connect India to the world, Mr. Singh said the Union Cabinet had decided not to further defer decisions on Indian Airlines. Things would be happening soon as the Ministries of Finance and Civil Aviation had cleared 90 per cent of the plans. Calling for a change in the mindset, he said Air India must learn to work less for itself and more for India.
Mr. Singh exhorted banks to emerge from the paralysis caused by the `C-3 factor' — the CBI, the CVC and the CAG and take bold decisions on lending money to citizens. He offered to take the brunt of the consequences if things went wrong due to these decisions.
Transparency had been introduced in the budget-making exercise, he said and regretted that attention had been focussed on the ups and downs of tax rates rather than on important aspect of administrative reforms in the finance and revenue departments. For the first time in 50 years, certain functions of the Department of Revenue were being outsourced.
India had achieved a growth of six per cent and 5.9 per cent in the first two quarters in the face of a severe drought, global economic downturn and geo-political instability. Manufacturing, exports and imports were on the rise while inflation had been pegged down to three to four per cent bracket in spite of drought. ``It will be difficult to find countries that can replicate this achievement,'' he added.
There was need to reduce the wide gap between policy formulations and actual delivery. The passage of 13 Bills on economic reforms in Parliament after 26 debates in both the Houses this last session was an outstanding achievement. Parliament had recognised the importance of the Bills and had shown that it could deliver when the occasion arose.
On the formulation of the CII president, Ashok Soota, that 10 million jobs must be generated annually if India were to achieve a 10 per cent growth, he said the Government would give high priority to health, housing, tourism and infrastructure, both physical and social. India must become a health destination of the world since quality treatment was already available here at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.
Mr. Chandrababu Naidu, in his keynote address, said India, as a country, was not poor and the problem was one of poverty in thinking.
The country could be transformed if proper policies were framed and inefficiency was tackled. Indians had performed exceptionally well internationally and the Indian diaspora of 20 million annually generated $ 160 billion, which was more than twice the GDP of a country like Malaysia.
The Andhra Pradesh Minister for Major Industries, K. Vidyadher Rao, and the Chairman of the Partnership Summit, Sanjiv Goenka, described the four-day event a big success.
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