Today the 2017-18 Economic Survey was put out in the public domain by the Finance Ministry. Overall the survey was bullish about India’s economic prospects by projecting a healthy 7-7.5% growth in 2018-19 fiscal.
It was also noted how the Economic Survey revealed one of the biggest advantages of Demonetisation of GST which was, increasing the number of citizens coming under the tax net. Besides this, the survey claimed that the private investment has picked up, and the long-standing twin balance sheet problem was being addressed.
As the Survey was authored by Arvind Subramanian, after giving a speech in this regard, he took a press-conference at the national media centre. In the press conference a variety of journalists posed questions to him with regards to his findings.
Out of these one of the questions which stood out, was posed by someone named Shoumik, who is employed by The Week magazine. Shoumik asked Subramanian a question with regards to jobs and demand. As per Shoumik, he was seeing a dearth of both in the economy and asked if the survey has a view.
To this Subramanian jokingly questioned whether Shoumik studied in JNU, as seen in the below video:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5EjiqUortM?start=4624]
Shoumik then actually replied in the negative, following which Subramanian in a light-hearted tone said that he was merely pulling his leg. To answer the question, Subramanian indicated that fully addressing the “dearth of demand” aspect might take some time.
He though asserted that he thinks the economy is picking up and acknowledged that earlier there was some dearth in demand which was changing to a certain extent. He claimed that the government has been injecting demand into the economy and the real interest rates have come down, plus the world demand too is picking up. Hence as per him, the argument about less demand would be a little less compelling as compared to a period 8-9 months ago.
