Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said her Ministry will also come out with its own assessment of the economy and that she is not averse to rolling out one more stimulus package.

 

She was participating in a virtual panel discussion on Monday along with Reliance Industries CMD Mukesh Ambani and Senior Minister of Singapore T Shanmugaratnam during the release of Portraits of Power: Half a Century of Being at Ringside, a book penned by NK Singh, Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission.

Sitharaman said the government has started doing some kind of an assessment and several inputs have been received which were very different from what her team had got in July. “Ideally, it should be so...perhaps yes, some time we will have to come up with a statement...the Finance Ministry will have to make an assessment,” she said.

Asked about another stimulus, the Minister said the previous packages were announced after a lot of consideration. “I have not closed the option to come up with one more stimulus,” she said.

To another question about the big-ticket reforms she would like to see, she pointed to the proposed PSU policy under which, barring strategic sectors, PSUs in all other areas are to be privatised; strong federalism; and a better education system.

Ambani, in response to a question by Maruti Suzuki India Chairman RC Bhargava, about the strategy for the manufacturing sector, called for rethinking and reinventing manufacturing.

MSME boost

On specific things that can be done for leadership, he said, “strengthening MSME”. “We have start-ups in the technology sector; I think India is right to support small and medium sector entrepreneurs and get them the physical start up. So we need as much thinking about bricks, as we have about clicks,” he said.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW