Cleaning up UPA mess, creation of manufacturing jobs priority: Arun Jaitley

To revive global investor confidence, cleaning up 'the mess created by the UPA government' in the power sector and comprehensive policy initiatives for making the country a low-cost manufacturing hub for generation of mass jobs are among the first steps the new government at the Centre needs to take, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Jaitley said on Tuesday while indicating his party's priorities for getting the economy back on a high growth path.

"If we do things to utilise our potential, hopefully we will have happier days ahead," he said while addressing local industrialists ahead of the party's public rally here today. The NDA government had left the legacy of 8.5 per cent growth rate. However, the successor government that would come to power was going to inherit a 4.5 per cent growth rate, which is unacceptable to the present generation, he said.

Jaitley, however, cautioned things may go from bad to worse if the country gave a fractured mandate in the ensuing general elections.

"What we need now is a larger mandate and we are the only party that can possibly provide a stable government, where you have to have a lot of decisiveness in decision making," he said. Being the world's largest democracy, India needs to be run by the tallest leader or the leader of the tallest party of the time unlike the UPA model where its tallest leaders were sitting outside the govt.

Jaitley accused the UPA of its flawed model of governance, its flawed policies that, according to him, led to corruption and blockage of national resources resulting in a loss of global investor confidence and slower economic growth. Over Rs 7 lakh crore of investments had remained stuck in the country due to lack of proper decision making in place, he said.

Had the country's PM stopped spectrum auction or coal block allocations initiated on the basis of some flawed policies when he came to know of it, things like arrest of civil servants, industrialists would not have happened in the first place, he said. Coal imports added $20 billion to the current account deficit even though the country has 200 years of reserves as the government messed up the coal and energy sector, according to him. Besides suggesting a host of steps to help revive the economy, Jaitely also said there was a lot of scope to correct and correctly target the welfare subsidies. These include aligning social schemes like the national employment guarantee programmes with asset creation to improve the living standards of rural masses.

On the bifurcation of AP, he said the division would offer enormous challenges and as well as opportunities for its people and governments.