Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said that demonetisation has hurt the country very badly and things have gone bad to worst.
“Demonetisation has hurt the country very badly. Things have gone from bad to worse in the past few months. Some say the GDP can be as low as 6.3 per cent. We can imagine that what kind of a disaster demonetisation is,” Manmohan Singh said at a Congress convention in New Delhi.
He alleged that the government’s claims of growth are false. “Modi ji’s propaganda of national income going up in the last two years has been proven to be hollow,” he said.
“Modi ji keeps on saying he will transform India’s economy. We know now that the beginning of the end has come…But the worst is yet to come,” Manmohan Singh added.
“When the GDP goes down, then employments will fall , production will fall, agriculture income will fall. What a disaster this demonetisation has caused?” he said.
Last week, the government estimated that the Indian economy will grow at 7.1 per cent this fiscal, without figuring in the impact of demonetisation.
In its first projection on India post-demonetisation, the World Bank has also lowered the country’s GDP growth estimate for this fiscal to 7 per cent, from its earlier estimate of 7.6 per cent made in June last year.
But experts fear the growth this fiscal could be lower than that, blaming the banning of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes for significant decline in various sectors of the economy.
