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Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Finance Minister | Photo: X/ @VBA2024
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday said that India becoming the third largest economy is not an arithmetic inevitability but requires efforts and a visionary leader to accomplish it.
Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram had recently told PTI that India will become the third largest economy in the world regardless of who becomes the prime minister. He said that India would achieve the third position given the size of its population, and there was “no magic” involved in it.
India’s economy has thrived under the leadership of PM @narendramodi , In comparison to the UPA, under the NDA tenure, the economy has surged significantlyIndia, which was at the 10th position under UPA in 2014, now stands at 5th in just 10 years in 2024, says Finance Minister… pic.twitter.com/96y0BqtvLN
— Viksit Bharat Ambassador (@VBA2024) April 29, 2024
Referring to comments by “a former finance minister”, Sitharaman said, “No magic is involved is what he said. Then why was there the roller coaster ride? No magic is involved and given our population will anyway grow inevitably, then why did we dip and rise and dip and rise?”
She said that India’s position in the world improved by two ranks from 12th place in 2004 to 10th rank in 2014. India’s
“We notched just two points up in 10 years after Prime Minister Vajpayee left. From the 10th rank, we have reached the fifth rank in 10 years and within two more, probably, it will go up to third rank,” FM said.
GDP is currently ranked fifth, after the US, China, Germany, and Japan.
Speaking at the Viksit Bharat Ambassador Campus Dialogue at Gitam University in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, Sitharaman compared the two crises faced by the UPA and NDA administrations over the ten years. She said that the global financial crisis in 2008-09 was not felt across the globe unlike the Covid pandemic in 2020.
“Despite COVID, we were able to reach the fifth place. Visionary Prime Minister, who will make sure that corruption doesn’t eat into the goodwill and into the earnings of the common people,” Sitharaman said.
First Published: Apr 29 2024 | 4:45 PM IST
