Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has said that India had achieved its economic growth in the last 30 years what took Britain 150 years to achieve.
He said that India had become a much “better place to do business” than it was earlier, though the bureaucratic obstacles still remained.
“India achieved as much economic progress in the (last) 30 years as the Great Britain did in 150 years. It is a very rapid space of transformation….why does there still seem to be visible poverty in India?” Krugman was quoted by IANS.
Krugman also highlighted that despite India making rapid progress on the economic front, the economic inequality in the country remained an issue. He added that corruption was one of the major stumbling blocks in India’s ambition to emulate the development of European countries.
“There are issues of corruption. You cannot become Denmark with Chinese levels of corruption,” IANS quoted him as saying. Krugman further added, “One problem is high degree of economic inequality.”
The Nobel laureate’s comments come right when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP, have been slammed for negating the contribution made by the previous Congress governments in India. Modi, in his countless speeches made both in India and abroad, has desperately sought to discredit the past governments led by Congress with charges of utter misgovernance.
It was the former prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who as the country’s finance minister in the early 90s decided to liberalise the Indian economy thereby causing a revolution of sorts in India.
