HYDERABAD: Speaking at the launch of his new book “Speaking Truth to Power” in Hyderabad on Saturday, former Finance and Home minister P Chidambaram touched upon a lot of issues ranging from the Union budget 2018, decline in growth rate, Gujarat elections and lessons Congress learnt from it, and Non Performing Assets plaguing the banking sector.
Speaking about the Union budget, the former minister said, “Budget is a political document written in economic terms The context of writing a budget should be the poor. Aravind Subramaniam’s economic survey says that in the last four years real agricultural output and income has remained stagnant when compared to non-farming sector. That’s an economists way of saying, ‘the farmers have become relatively poorer with lesser income.” He also spoke about economy. “For first time India’s economy has decoupled from world’s economy. When the world economy is picking up, we are growing at slower rate,” he said.