In order to improve infrastructure and bring down rampant poverty, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley highlighted that India’s economy needs to reach an annual growth rate of 9-10% and then sustain that activity more than a decade.
Jaitley, after presenting a budget that focused on boosting growth before taking on structural reforms, underscored that in order to achieve this goal, the $2 trillion South Asian economy needs to find investment from outside. He admitted that investment available within the country, including bank’s ability to finance was modest and therefore the country would require money from wherever it was available.
The Finance Minister used China as an example of what high growth rates could achieve over a decades-long period. He emphasized that if the country could reach 8% growth and then boost it to the 9-10% range than the economy could achieve better infrastructure and bring down poverty rates at a faster pace.
'Union Budget 2015-16' was the first full- fledged budget since Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s landslide election victory last May. It promised higher investment in India`s decrepit roads and railways, while offering the carrot of tax cuts to global companies but the stick of tighter rules to get business tycoons to invest at home rather than put away wealth overseas.