Taking stock of the performance over the last one year and charting out the path to be followed by the government for the next fiscal in its pursuit to become a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey 2019-20 in the Parliament on Friday. While acknowledging the slowdown in growth, the Survey said the economy was poised for a rebound towards the $5 trillion goal by 2024-25.
However, it added that this aspiration depended critically on strengthening the invisible hand of the market while supporting it with the hand of trust.
The Survey document said that India’s GDP growth would be 5 per cent for the current fiscal while projecting growth for the next fiscal in the range of 6 to 6.5 per cent.
It also suggested that government policies must empower transparency and effective enforcement using data and technology and that promotion of ‘pro-business’ policy that unleashes the power of competitive markets to generate wealth. It advocated weaning away from ‘pro-crony’ policy that may favour specific private interests, especially powerful incumbents.
The Survey also discouraged government intervention in the markets saying that even though such interventions are well intended, they often ends up undermining the ability of the markets to support wealth creation and often lead to outcomes opposite to those intended.
“The government must systematically examine areas of needless intervention and undermining of markets; but it does not argue that there should be no government intervention. Instead it suggests that the interventions that were apt in a different economic setting may have lost their relevance in a transformed economy,” it explained.
The Survey also said that India had an unprecedented opportunity to chart a China-like, labour-intensive, export trajectory by focusing on “Make In India” which could create four crore well-paid jobs by 2025 and eight crore by 2030.
“A strategy similar to the one used by China to grab this opportunity includes specialization at large scale in labour-intensive sectors, especially network products, laser-like focus on enabling assembling operations at mammoth scale in network products and export primarily to markets in rich countries.Trade policy must be an enabler,” it explained.