PM’s $5-trn economy goal a pipe dream: Manmohan

New Delhi
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the economy was facing a dangerously protracted slowdown and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of expanding it to $5 trillion by 2024 was a “pipe dream.”

“The country is in the midst of a dangerously protracted slowdown and the economy is going from bad to worse. The dangerous thing is the government is complacent enough to not realise the current situation,” he said hoping for an urgent financial stimulus to promote demand and investment to arrest the economic decline.
“The PM has been talking of $5 trillion economy by 2024…This looks like a pipe dream. In 2018-2019, the economy was of the size of $ 2.7 trillion and if we have to reach $5 trillion by 2024, we need a growth rate of 12 per cent per annum in nominal term and 9 per cent in real term. And if the economy goes down quarter after quarter, there is no hope that the PM’s promise of a $5 trillion economy will become a reality. Our responsibility is to take this message to the country and point out how the BJP has misled the people,” Singh warned as the Congress announced an agitation plan on the economic slowdown.

The agitations will be held across the country between October 15 and 25. Singh provided fodder for the agitations, saying “There is an atmosphere of gloom and doom all around.” He predicted job loss nearing a million if current trends of dipping auto sales continued and urged Congress colleagues to tell people how the BJP had “misled” the country.
“What was promised is not being delivered and there is no sign that the government is thinking of a real plan of action to incentivise the economy,” the former PM said at the meeting chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to discuss plans for marking the end of yearlong celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

‘Protracted slump’

The country is in the midst of a dangerously protracted slowdown and the economy is going from bad to worse. The dangerous thing is the government is complacent enough to not realise the current situation. —Manmohan Singh, Former PM