NEW DELHI: Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said on Friday that demonetisation implemented by the Modi government and the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) stalled India’s economic growth rate in 2017, PTI reported.
“What happened in 2017 is that even as the world picked up, India went down. That reflects the fact that these blows (demonetisation and GST) have really really been hard blows…Because of these headwinds, we have been held back,” he said.
Addressing an audience at the University of California in Berkeley, Rajan said, “The two successive shocks of demonetisation and the GST had a serious impact on growth in India. Growth has fallen off interestingly at a time when growth in the global economy has been peaking up,” said Rajan, who delivered the second Bhattacharya Lecture on the “Future of India”.
The former RBI governor, a long-standing critic of Note Bandi had previously said demonetisation “was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted.”