Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said India is in talks with different countries, including Singapore and the UAE, to make RuPay acceptable there. She also said payment systems UPI, BHIM and NPCI are all now being worked in such a way that the systems of respective countries can talk to the Indian system and the interoperability will then itself give strength to India’s expertise in those countries.
On India’s economic performance, Sitharaman said pre-pandemic efforts included making the Indian economy robust with the infrastructure of not just roads but also digital infrastructure ready, financial inclusion so that everybody has access to a bank account. All this came in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
India’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose 13.5 per cent in the June 2022 quarter (Q1FY23) as compared with the 20.1 per cent growth registered in Q1 2021-22. It was the fastest growth in a year, as the country’s GDP had grown at 4.1 per cent in the previous quarter (Q4FY22), 5.4 per cent in the December 2021 quarter of FY22, and 8.4 per cent in September 2021 quarter.
However, on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) slashed its estimate for India’s GDP growth in the current financial year started April by 60 basis points to 6.8 per cent from a previously expected 7.4 per cent, on account of lower-than-expected growth in April-June and weak external demand. The figure for FY24 was left unchanged at 6.1 per cent.
Sitharaman made the remarks at the prestigious Brookings Institute think-tank during a fireside chat with eminent economist Eshwar Prasad.
She said multilateral institutions need to be robust and strengthened in order to give solutions, and voices of emerging markets will have to find traction. “We are working together for global good.”
On the reforms in the Indian economy, she said, “It is the process that the government has to keep doing and doing and carrying it forwards. It is not sufficient to just privatise a company here or there but even look at some of the core sectors which we have announced during the 2021 budget… We opened up all the sectors for the private sector to come in, there was no one area totally reserved for the public sector.”
Sitharaman added that reforms are going through steadily and continuously. “It’s not like we’ve done that and the story ended there. We are committed to third-generation reforms and are going through with them.”
On the agriculture sector, the finance minister said the government last year had to pay much more for imports of fertilisers due to the rise in international prices. But the Modi government took the burden of the entire price rise and the farmers paid what they had paid in 2018-19.
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