This Is The Right Time”: Nirmala Sitharaman Explains White Paper Call

New Delhi: 

The Indian economy has been transformed from a “fragile” state to one of the largest in the world, and this is the right time to commission a white paper, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told NDTV Friday evening in her first interview since presenting the 2024 Interim Budget.

In her budget speech yesterday, the Finance Minister said she planned to commission a white paper on the performance of the economy over the 10 years of the Narendra Modi government compared to the 10 of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

“In 2014, we took over an economy in such a bad state. There was economic paralysis and corruption… we needed a white paper then. But at the time the Prime Minister put the people first.”

If we had brought a white paper at that time, nobody would have invested in the country looking at the fragile state of the economy,” Ms Sitharaman explained. “We took the Indian economy from ‘fragile’ to the top. This is why we are bringing in a white paper now. This is the right time.”

Ms Sitharaman’s announcement was “welcomed” by Congress leader P Chidambaram, who was the Union Finance Minister in the Manmohan Singh government from 2012 to 2014. “If a 100-page white paper comes, we will respond to that also. We are not afraid of a white paper,” he said.

Addressing reporters after the budget speech, Mr Chidambaram said he had only one condition – that the document be written by an independent body, one not affiliated with either political party (the BJP or the Congress), or government think-tank NITI Aayog, or the Ministry of Finance.

“Then let us see whose performance is better…” he told a news channel.