Nobel winner Abhijit Banerjee says India economy doing ‘badly’ at MIT meet yesterday

At a MIT press meet yesterday, Indian-American Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee spoke on the current slowdown of Indian Economy and urged the government to make policies which work and not policies which they imagine will work. He even cited recent survey datas which are being ‘debated as wrong or right data’ as Banerjee mentioned. Most surveys indicate a slide down in the demand graph of Indian consumers, both rural and urban which as per Banerjee is quite alarming and can lead to a long term impact.  

In an interview he mentions: “I think there is always a little bit of a willingness in India to announce a policy because they sound good or they have a political purpose. The general message is you should carefully evaluate them, understand whether the policy works or not and take it from there. Even now I think it is not that the policies are evaluated based on accepted criteria and looked at as an option.” 

As we all know, Banerjee had been critical of the Narendra Modi government’s demonetisation exercise previously and had said he did not understand the logic behind it. At MIT yesterday he said in clear words that “Indian economy is doing very badly even as the government is increasingly recognising that there is a problem. The fact that we see in that is that between 2014-15 and 2017-18, that number has slightly gone down. And that’s the first time such a thing has happened in many many many many many years so that’s a very glaring warning sign.”