PAC to call Urjit in January to review economic costs

NEW DELHI: Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday decided to call RBI Governor and top Finance Ministry officials next month to review the economic situation following the demonetisation of high value notes.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is a committee of selected members of Parliament, constituted by the Parliament of India, for the auditing of the revenue and the expenditure of the Government of India.

The decision to call RBI Governor Urjit Patel, Finance Secretary Ashok Lavasa and Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das was taken unanimously by all the members of the Committee, headed by senior Congress leader K V Thomas.

“In the PAC meeting today, we took an unanimous decision that in first or second week of January, we will call the RBI Governor, Economic Affairs Secretary and Finance Secretary to review the economic situation after demonetisation,” Thomas said after the meeting.

The exact date will be decided depending on the availability of the RBI Governor, he added.

On November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the demonetisation of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

According to various estimates, the GDP growth this fiscal is expected to witness a decline due to demonetisation, but the range varies from 0.5-2 per cent.

After releasing GDP numbers for July-september, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian had yesterday said: “What we have for the first half are actual numbers. It shows good consistent performance. For the second half, we will have to see, there is a lot of uncertainty. We have to analyse it before we say something.”

The Indian economy grew 7.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2016-17, up from 7.1 per cent in the previous three-month period, as per the government data.

Last week in the Rajya Sabha, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said the demonetisation step was a “monumental management failure” which would lead to 2 per cent drop in GDP.