NEW DELHI: Indian-American Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee said on Monday that the Indian economy is “doing very badly” and “the government should do pilots of policy initiatives more carefully”.
Giving a piece of advise to the Modi government’s policymakers, Banerjee at a press conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the economy is in a “tailspin” and that the ruling government should to waste time in worrying about monetary policy, as reported.
Citing the recent National Sample Survey figures, Banerjee said, “The Indian economy is doing very badly in my opinion.”
“There is an enormous fight going on in India over which data is right. The government has a particular view that all data inconvenient to it are wrong. Nonetheless, this is something that even the government is increasingly recognising,” Banerjee said.
He warned that the “the economy is slowing very, very fast. How fast, we don’t know. There is this dispute about data, but I think… fast.”
“The government has a large deficit but right now, it’s sort of at least aiming to please everybody by pretending to hold to some budgetary targets and monetary targets,” said Banerjee.
The MIT professor, who has won the Nobel for Economics advised the Indian government not to “worry so much about monetary stability and worry a little bit more about demand. I think demand is a huge problem right now in the economy.”
Banerjee on Monday told the ABP Ananda news channel: “The condition of the Indian economy is not healthy…. Whatever I’m seeing, I cannot feel reassured. Around 5-7 years ago, there were concerns like the environment, but at least there was growth in the economy. Now, that’s not the case.”