Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has blamed the NDA government’s

( Read 2598 Times)

New Delhi: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has blamed the NDA government’s “mindset” for the lack of consensus on economic reforms that are crucial to India’s ambitions to grow fast and pull millions of its people out of poverty.
Twenty-five years to the day when Singh, as finance minister then, unveiled a historic budget that transformed India from a socialist-style to a market-driven economy, a renewed momentum to address the unfinished agenda of the reforms programme has eluded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
“The two years that this government has had, they could have been used much purposefully to push the reforms process further,” Singh told HT in an exclusive interview.
“For various reasons this has not happened. Whether it is the GST (goods and services tax), whether it is the land-acquisition bill, whatever the differences among political parties.”
Singh, who was the prime minister from 2004 to 2014, said it was the responsibility of the government of the day to find ways and means to bring about a broad-based consensus.
“That’s a process which simply requires a different mindset from a mindset that says the government’s mindset is to build a Congress-mukt India,” he said. “If your mission is to destroy the Congress party, you can’t expect the Congress party, howsoever well-intentioned you are, to cooperate in that process.”