‘Note ban slowed India’s economic growth’

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday held his successor Narendra Modi’s demonetisation move responsible for the slowdown in India’s economic growth.

During his brief intervention at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), Singh claimed that private sector investment has collapsed and the economy was running on just one engine of public spending.

“India's GDP numbers for the fourth quarter and full year of 2016-17 were released a few days ago. lndia's economic growth has slowed down sharply, driven primarily by the notebandi announcement of November 2016,” he told the leaders.

The former PM, an economist, had slammed demonetisation in his speech in the Rajya Sabha on November 24 last year during a debate on the note ban.

He had termed the move as “monumental mismanagement and a case of organised loot and legalised plunder”.

Later, addressing a Congress convention at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium on January 11 this year, he said India’s economy has gone from bad to worse after the ₹500 and ₹1,000-rupee notes were scrapped.

Singh told the CWC that the most “worrisome” aspect of all this is the impact on job creation.

“Jobs have been extremely hard to come by for the youth. The construction industry, which is one of the largest employment generators in the country, has suffered a contraction. This implies loss of millions of jobs for the nation's workplace,” he said.

For her part, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said Singh’s forecast on demonetisation was correct. “Till today, the government refuses to disclose how much of the demonetised currency in circulation was actually returned to banks. It isn't that the Reserve Bank of India has forgotten how to count money; it is that the actual numbers show that the scheme was a disaster,” she said at the meeting.