The government has been facing criticism over rising fuel prices and runaway inflation. Mr.Kant pointed out that, whether the tax structure on these essentials needs to be rationalized to bring relief for people, the ideal pace for tax collection must remain to ensure there are enough resources to be pumped into reviving the economy in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr. Kant told NDTV, “There is a dilemma before the government. One of the key challenges is that if you want to get into high trajectories of growth and if you really want to revive India’s economy, how do you accelerate the pace of infrastructure, how do you spend more and more?”.
“And to my mind, the revival of India’s economy will be through putting more and more resources into good quality infrastructure and the focus has to be on creation of really top-class infrastructure, which will lead to job creation and that will lead to construction getting revived,” the NITI Aayog CEO said.
“The government has been able to provide food supply to 800 million people and during this period, it has ensured that the MGNREGA programme goes on effectively in rural areas,” Mr Kant further added.
According to NDTV, RBI in its monetary policy last month kept interest rates unchanged at record lows and committed to maintain an accommodative policy stance to support growth. Retail inflation remained above the RBI’s comfort level of 6 per cent for two straight months at 6.26 per cent in June, data released earlier this week showed.
