Former Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Arvind Panagariya has said that the present government has made a huge progress in implementing reforms including some difficult structural ones such as the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) that previous governments had difficulty in introducing. He also said that the government should stick to the fiscal deficit target for current financial year (FY19) and continue with the reforms undertaken during the over four years.
He further stated that government should not shift its goal posts as far as fiscal deficit target is concerned. Fiscal consolidation has been a key achievement of the government and it has played a central role in macroeconomic stability that has characterised the economy during the last four years. For the FY19, the government aims to strictly maintain 3.3 percent fiscal deficit target. Moreover, he pointed out that in the last four years of present NDA government, growth has averaged 7.3 percent compared with 5.9 percent during the last two years under the UPA.
Besides, the fiscal deficit for the first six months - April-September - of the current financial year had exceeded 95 percent of the Budget Estimate. Fiscal deficit for the period April-September crossed Rs 5.94 lakh crore which is 95.3 percent of the Budget Estimate (over Rs 6.24 lakh crore). The corresponding figure for the same period of the last fiscal was over 91 percent of the Budget Estimate.