ET Awards 2015: Modi government vows to pursue reform and growth

Top ministers of the Narendra Modi government vowed to keep pushing hard for reform and economic growth and said the Congress party, particularly the Gandhi family, was being unreasonable and obstructive.

At a panel discussion on the occasion of the ET Awards, finance minister Arun Jaitley said the upper house of Parliament, where the Congress had repeatedly blocked the Goods and Services Tax ( GST), had become the “last bastion of obstructionism”.

He also said the party’s “mid-command” seemed to be under pressure from the highcommand to block.

But even if the Congress keeps obstructing, there would be other ways to deal with the situation, power, coal and renewable energy minister Piyush Goyal said. “We may have to look at alternative mechanisms to achieve the same goal…I think the finance minister must be having a trick or two up his sleeve which he cannot reveal at the Awards function,” Goyal said in the discussion that also included telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and railway minister Suresh Prabhu.

Prabhu was severely critical of the Opposition. “The Opposition has to oppose for its own purpose, but then they should also propose. GST was debated for a very long time…but Opposition must also give workable ideas,” he said. Noted industrialist Rahul Bajaj drew applause from the audience of India’s top corporate leaders and bankers when he proposed that the government needs to get past the Opposition whether out of love, fear or anything else.

Jaitley said the government would keep a balance between fiscal discipline and the need to step up expenditure on infrastructure and social sectors. He said infrastructure spending was delivering results in areas like the rural sector and national highways.

Prabhu said projects such as the bullet train would have far-reaching effect on the ecosystem just like Suzuki’s investment in India helped not only in making a car, but also helped in the growth of many other units for components and related sectors. He said the bullet train project would do similar good.



India's business glitterati at the ET Awards 2015: Pix BCCL

Similarly, the orders for locomotive manufacturing units was also doing all-round good. “We will build two major loco manufacturing set ups in India. This will be stateof-the-art, eco-friendly and mostly advanced.

Rs 40,000 crore of contracts have already been awarded. Beyond the bullet train and the contracts, it will help develop the ecosystem which will help us to get on the global map of supply chain.”

The ministers also dwelled at length on how the Modi government had improved the Ease of Doing Business. Jaitley said India’s ranking in Ease of Doing Business would go up significantly next year because the previous rating could not factor in many initiatives due to a deadline.

He said that almost all official agencies at the state and the Central level were making it much easier to do business; municipal authorities and local bodies were still perceived to be an obstruction. He said the Central government and states were in talks to resolve this.

Prabhu said the railways were taking measures to improve transparency with the help of e-tendering and delegation of powers to officials. Goyal also said he had stopped looking at files that involved issues of individual companies so that he could focus on broader policy issues.