Aday after pledging more reforms to boost growth, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday said the government plans to take sector-specific measures to revive stressed sectors.
“Government has announced specific measures to deal with the slowdown being faced by automobile sector and similar initiatives are being done and will continue to be taken for each of the stressed sectors. The positive intervention from government has to be a continuous process till the current slowdown comes to a halt,” Sitharaman told an event jointly organized by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, Ficci and CitiBank.
Industry lobby Ficci put out a series of tweets from Sitharaman’s roundtable with institutional investors in Washington. Other sectors represented at the event included insurance, banks, private equity and debt restructuring companies.
So far the finance minister has announced packages for automobiles, infrastructure, exports and the real estate sectors.
Sitharaman, who is currently in the US for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund, said the government is fully committed to introducing deep reforms. “The fact that government is engaging with various stakeholders and taking several reform measures is strong signal of trust building,” she added.
The Indian economy is battling a severe demand slowdown and liquidity crunch that have resulted in economic growth slowing to 5% in the three months ended June, and growth in private consumption expenditure slumping to an 18-quarter low of 3.1%. In addition, industrial output contracted 1.1% in August, its worst show in 81 months, signalling a further deepening of the economic downturn.
On Tuesday, Sitharaman said more reforms were on the anvil before the close of this fiscal. “The reforms were and will be guided by close scrutiny of growth evidence in the economy,” she said at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Sitharaman said investors can find no better place than India: “It is one of the fastest growing (economies) even today. It has the best skilled manpower and a government that is continuously doing what is required in the name of reforms, above all democracy and rule of law,” Sitharaman was quoted as saying by PTI.
Sitharaman reiterated India’s commitment to transparent policymaking, implementing banking reforms in close collaboration with the Reserve Bank of India, creating liquidity flow, exploring ways to bring in private sector investments and deepening economic reforms.
Press Trust of India contributed to this story.
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