New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Tuesday that the government has adopted a targeted approach, based on ground-level inputs, to tackle retail inflation which is ruling at around 7 per cent. Nirmala Sitharaman was replying to a short-duration debate on price rise in the Rajya Sabha.
Sitharaman stressed that the fundamentals of the Indian economy are strong. Indian economy compared to the situation prevailing in peer-group nations and even developed countries is definitely ‘much better’, Sitharaman said.
However, the minister also acknowledged that global factors are impacting the economy, and said ‘these are realities’. Sitharaman said that both the government and the Reserve Bank of India are taking steps to bring down inflation below 7 per cent and further under 6 per cent as quickly as possible.
The government has tasked the RBI to ensure that the consumer price index (CPI) based inflation remains at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on either side.
Also read: No collapse of Indian rupee, asserts Nirmala Sitharaman
Sitharaman also countered opposition charges that the central government was only working for Ambanis and Adanis, and not the poor. Such arguments, Sitharaman said only politicise an important debate like the one on price rise.
Sitharaman also said that the government has contained prices of tomato, onion, potato and she compared the present rates with those of November 2013 to justify her claims. She also clarified that there will be no GST on use of crematoriums, tax will be levied on construction of new crematoriums.
