India, and particularly BJP, knows it only too well what the "Shining India" slogan did to the Atal Behari Vajpayee government in 2004. So its gut feeling should make the BJP curb the bravado of its Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and resist his call for celebrating a 7.5 percent growth rate. Instead, it may do good to its electoral fortunes in the 2019 national election if it follows RBI governor Raghuram Rajan's sagacious words on how to manage the economy. For he is the second good thing that has happened to the NDA government after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari. Had he not been there in the RBI, the present story of India's growth would have had different tag lines.
Despite being rebuffed by a finance minister whose knowledge of economics may be limited to how the word is spelled, Rajan, being an intelligent patriot, has been steering the economy on the road to growth by roasting the pig of inflation to feed the economy. The revival in factory output and decelerated inflation rate are sufficient to prove that Rajan has always been right and his critics wrong.
Cautioning against 'euphoria' about India being the world's fastest-growing economy, he said on Wednesday in Pune that India still remains one of the poorest nations and has "a long way to go", as he sought to contextualise his controversial 'one-eyed is king' analogy. "We are still one of the poorest large countries in the world on a per capita basis and have a long way to go before we reasonably address the concerns of each one of our citizens," Rajan said, adding that the current growth rate needs to be sustained for the next 20 years to ensure a "decent livelihood" for every Indian.
"The average Chinese citizen is over four times richer than average Indian," the outspoken RBI Governor said while referring to the frequent comparison between the two nations. Stating that Chinese economy was smaller than India's in the 1960s but is now five times bigger, Rajan said, "Among the BRICS (group) we have the lowest per capita GDP".
Rajan's comments have followed the criticism by some union ministers of his recent remarks in the US that India being proclaimed as the 'bright spot in a gloomier world economy' was like "a one-eyed man being a king in the land of blind". Stating that his comment was misunderstood as "the words and not their intent" were given more importance, the former IMF Chief Economist said, "As a central banker who has to be pragmatic, I cannot get euphoric if India is the fastest growing large economy".
Rebutting Rajan's remarks, the Finance Minister, who's in a hurry like most of the Indians to earn kudos for doing nothing, had said any other country would be celebrating at 7.5 per cent growth rate. Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's comments were more nuanced when she said in an interview to a newspaper that the RBI Governor should have used 'better words' in view of the opposition behaves in this country.
Unruffled, Rajan has maintained that "We can't get carried away by our current superiority in growth, for as soon as we believe in our own superiority and start distributing future wealth as if we already have it, we stop doing all that is required to continue growing. This movie has played too many times in our past for us to not know how it ends."
Underlining the need to change perceptions, he said a high growth rate can be delivered over a long term only by "implementing, implementing, and implementing". "The sobering thought is we have a long way to go before we can claim we have arrived," Rajan averred, while addressing students at the convocation of the National Institute of Bank Management.
In a gracious move, he apologised to the visually-impaired people