Jayant Sinha takes on father Yashwant; defends Modi's economic policies

Jayant Sinha argues critics have missed the fundamental structural reforms that are transforming the economy 

A day after senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha hit out at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for creating an economic mess, his son and Union minister, Jayant Sinha, has defended the government's economic policies, stating that it is undertaking structural reforms that are "necessary to create a 'New India' and provide good jobs for our billion-strong workforce".

In a Times of India blog post, Jayant wrote that stories on the challenges faced by the Indian economy are "conclusions drawn from a narrow set of facts".

"They have simply missed the fundamental structural reforms that are transforming the economy," he said.(economy today)

Here is how he defended the Narendra Modi government:

1) The Union minister argued that one, or two, quarters of GDP growth were quite inadequate to evaluate the long-term impact of the structural reforms underway.

Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha, for his part, has said, "For quarter after quarter, the growth rate of the economy has been declining until it reached the low of 5.7 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal, the lowest in three years.

And please note that the methodology for calculation of the GDP was changed by the present government in 2015 as a result of which the growth rate recorded earlier increased statistically by over 200 basis points on an annual basis. So, according to the old method of calculation, the growth rate of 5.7 per cent is actually 3.7 per cent or less."

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