Economic Survey, an utter confession of Govt failures: P Chidambaram

Aamir H Kaki

Senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said on Tuesday that the Economic Survey was an ‘utter confession’ that the current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the last four years, has failed to deal with three major issues of employment, education and agriculture.

He was speaking at a panel discussion after release of his book, Speaking Truth to Power - a collection of his columns in The Indian Express published by Rupa Publications. The book was released by former President Pranab Mukherjee.

Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, senior journalist Shekhar Gupta also participated in the panel discussion. The session was moderated by journalist and television personality Nidhi Razdan.

Chidambaram disputed the claims made in a recently released study that the current government has created 7 million jobs in the country. He termed the conclusions of the study was flawed.

“It was good to use payroll as a measure but to extrapolate it to reach the figure that they did was flawed,” he said.

Chidambaram mentioned the recent survey of CSDS, which has said that the number one concern of the people of India was jobs.

“If you are creating 7 million jobs, why should it be the number one concern?” he questioned.

He said that in the upcoming Budget, Modi government would need to address the challenge of creating jobs and the problem of economic growth.