| Pranab Mukherjee: How we repaid the IMF loan |
| Pranab Mukherji / New Delhi February 29, 2008 |
| It was 1982. I had just placed my first Budget as Union Finance Minister on the Table of the House. Discussions had started. Suddenly, Shri Ravindra Varma - an excellent parliamentarian - dropped a bombshell: that my Budget documents had been given to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before they were introduced in the Lok Sabha. At that time, the government had negotiated with the IMF a loan in the form of Extended Funding Facility to the tune of 5 billion SDRs. This IMF loan had raised enormous heat and dust in the media. Varma, a minister in the previous Janata Party government, started reading out from the document he possessed and claimed that the Budget document of 1982-83 had been |
