Montek Singh Ahluwalia
• Hello and welcome to Walk the Talk. This is Shekhar Gupta and we are at the India Gate lawns, in the very heart of the babu heartland. My guest today is Montek Singh Ahluwalia, not quite a babu, an intellectual among babus and a babu among intellectuals.
That’s a good description.
• We are doing this exactly at the halfway point of this government. So what is more interesting — the report card of the first half, or the plans for the second half?
Well, it’s a good report card. At the end of two and a half years, the government can feel pretty pleased on many dimensions. Of course, a lot remains to be done. That’s an issue we keep worrying about.
• When we had the same conversation two and a half years ago, how did the picture look to you? As you functioned in government, what surprised you?
The most positive thing is that I had felt at the time that the economy had got to a position where many years of reforms had strengthened its potential. So I was hoping that economic performance would be good. That’s clearly been the case. We’ve got a four year average of 8 per cent growth which we’ve never had. And on the macro side also, things have been good, prices have been reasonably in control although in the last several months there’s a bit of an uptake. The external sector which used to be a huge bugbear, has been completely outside the area of concern even though oil prices shot up. I think that’s an incredible success story of reforms.
... contd.
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