PM Modi attends NITI Aayog’s meeting with economists, says early budget to make funds available at start of fiscal

New Delhi: The Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tuesday attended an interactive session with economists and other experts, organized by NITI Aayog, on the theme “Economic Policy – The Road Ahead.”

During the session, participants shared their views on various economic themes such as agriculture, skill development and job creation, taxation and tariff related matters, education, digital technology, housing, tourism, banking, governance reform, data driven policy, and future steps for growth.

In his intervention, the Prime Minister thanked various participants for their suggestions and observations. In particular, he called for innovative approaches in areas such as skill development and tourism.

Speaking about the budget cycle, he said this has an effect on the real economy. He said that in our existing budget calendar, the authorization of expenditure comes with the onset of the monsoon. This he said, results in government programmes being relatively inactive in the productive pre-monsoon months. He said that keeping this in view, the date of budget presentation is being advanced, so that expenditure is authorized by the time the new financial year begins.

Speaking about the budget cycle, PM Modi said this has an effect on the real economy: PMO on NITI Aayog meet with economists — ANI (@ANI_news) December 27, 2016

The government is proposing to present the budget for 2017-18 on February 1 instead of the regular date of February 28. Also, there will be no separate railway budget for the next fiscal as the government has decided to merge it with the general budget.

The meeting was attended by the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the Minister of State for Planning Rao Inderjit Singh, the Vice Chairman NITI Aayog Arvind Panagariya, and senior officers from the Union Government and NITI Aayog.

It was also attended by economists and experts including Pravin Krishna, Sukhpal Singh, Vijay Paul Sharma, Neelkanth Mishra, Surjit Bhalla, Pulak Ghosh, Govinda Rao,  Madhav Chavan, NK Singh, Vivek Dehejia, Pramath Sinha, Sumit Bose, and TN Ninan.

The meeting assumes significance in view of various multilateral agencies and RBI lowering growth outlook for the current fiscal. RBI has reduced the forecast to 7.1 percent from 7.6 percent in its monetary policy review earlier this month.

Multilateral funding body Asian Development Bank (ADB) too slashed growth projection to 7 percent for the current fiscal, from its earlier 7.4 percent due to the impact of cash recall on economic activities.

Indian economy expanded by 7.1 percent and 7.3 percent in first and second quarters of 2016-17, respectively.