press trust of india
New Delhi, Jan 27: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Tuesday said fiscal deficit targets for current year are likely to be met and manufacturing sector is showing turnaround signs.
“Even though the revenues have been challenging due to slow manufacturing industry, now, it is turning around and it looks like we will be able to meet our fiscal targets,” Jaitley said here. The government has pegged fiscal deficit target at 4.1 per cent of the GDP for the current year.
“Our currency is one of those two global currencies that withstood the might of the US dollar. Most of the global currencies are under pressure,” he said. Stating that last one week had been a great learning for him, the Finance Minister said, “The sense I got in last few days is that ordinarily everything is going well with India.
“From depressing slowdown in last two three years, suddenly our growth rates are likely to look up.” On the other hand, competing economies globally have not been so good. “Brazil faces a challenge, South Africa faces challenge. Europe is still struggling to come out of slowdown. China which has maintained a growth rate of over 9 per cent over 3 decades is looking at new normal,” he said.
On current account deficit, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said it is likely to look much better. Rising gold imports widened current account deficit to $ 10.1 billion or 2.1 per cent of GDP in July-September quarter of this fiscal, up from 1.2 per cent a year ago.
The current account deficit (CAD) is the net difference between inflows and outflows of foreign currencies. Jaitley further said that the government is working towards an investor friendly tax administration. “There is a huge amount of interest and curiosity. Along with this huge amount of interest and curiosity, there were two concerns… our decision making being slow, our lack of policy stablity…,”
he said.
