“India is determined to carry out reforms. We do not need lesser reforms but we need more and more reforms. And the government will push for greater levels of reforms across sectors, make things easy, make things simple,” Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said on Monday while observing that wealth is created by the private sector and the government must act as a facilitator.
Kant was replying to a question at the CII Partnership Summit 2021 on whether the repeal of three contentious agricultural laws will change the appetite of the government to do further significant reforms.
“The basic philosophy of this government is that wealth is created by the private sector, we have to make things easy for them and the government must act as facilitator and catalyst, and we continue to push all reforms in that direction,” he added.
The government has repealed three contentious agricultural laws against which farmers had been protesting at Delhi borders for over a year. The three laws are-
- The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act,
- The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act,
- and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act
These laws had paved the way for contract farming, enabling farmers to sell products outside the Agriculture Produce Market Committees among others.
Kant said that the focus of the government is to make India’s exports competitive. He observed that India has grown in those periods when exports have grown substantially and that shows that India must be extremely competitive.
Replying to a question on climate change, Kant said India’s strategy is that we should aggressively push the decarbonisation programme. “India has demonstrated to the world that it is one of the cheapest producers of renewable energy,” he said, adding that the country should be the largest producer of renewable energy and exporter of green hydrogen.
He said the economic and governance reforms undertaken in India in the last few years have addressed critical bottlenecks in India’s growth story that will usher in a new era of growth and prosperity.
“Reforms cannot be seen in a piecemeal fashion. They must be pieces in the puzzle that forms part of the big picture,” he added. According to him, all reforms undertaken by the government in the last seven years will have the effect of boosting India’s investment prospects. Referring to the national monetisation pipeline (NMP),
he said that in a revenue constrained environment, sustaining public infrastructure development requires unlocking financing through innovative models and the national asset pipeline and national monetisation pipeline are an effort towards this direction. “Public investment in infrastructure takes a more important role in the time of economic slowdown owing to its multiplier effect,” he said.
He noted that going digital and green will be the key in the post-Covid era.“To fulfil our vision of making India’s products globally competitive, this is the time for us to establish a new identity of quality and reliability and therefore we are pushing for greener industries,” he said.
