•The Prime Minister has talked about pump-priming the economy? But we have not seen any economic stimulus package so far.

FM: That’s a question you should ask on the way back to India. We’ve just passed a supplementary demand, which is about Rs 1,05,000 crore additional cash expenditure. Where do you think it is going? All of it is going into NREG, rural development. Just look at the heads under which we have this.

•What would have happened if we had surveillance and early-warning mechanisms?

FM: In retrospective, it is clear that if there had been an effective surveillance mechanism, it could have or should have identified the huge risks that were being taken by some international financial entities. In the absence of this oversight mechanism, these financial entities, some of which have collapsed, took unacceptable risk. That was what led to the crisis in United States, which is there at the centre of the crisis.

•What will be the impact on India?

FM: We can’t measure the impact. We have said, we will be indirectly impacted, there will be impact to some extent on our growth, our exports, and it will also impact the currency flows, as it has already. But we are confident that given the underlying strengths of Indian economy we can weather the crisis and still return a decent growth in 2008-09, even the IMF’s last week’s assessment places India’s growth rate in the current fiscal at 7.8 per cent. We will still return a decent growth rate, we will suffer an indirect impact.

... contd.