My views 'fact-based', says Niti Aayog VC after blaming Raghuram Rajan for slowdown

NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar's commenton former RBI chief Raghuram Rajan has landed him in trouble. In his defence on Monday, the vice chairman clarified that he did not target any individual but the policies that were framed and undertaken.

Kumar, on late Monday evening, took to Twitter and posted out his clarification in a tweet. He stated that some misleading headlines have forced him to reiterate that the "discussion is on policies, not people".

"My views on GDP’s decline being unrelated to solely demonetisation and having begun way before with stricter norms of NPA by RBI under Mr Rajan R fact-based & self-explanatory but some misleading headlines have coerced me to reiterate that the discussion is on policies, not people," read the tweet.

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Kumar had said that it wasn't demonetisation but deleveraging of credit under former RBI chief Raghuram Rajan's tenure that led to the economic slowdown in India.

In an interview, Kumar said that growth rate came down not because of demonetisation but there was a declining trend.

"Starting from last quarter of 2015-16, the growth rate had come down for six successive quarters," he had stated.

"It is a continuation of a trend of a declining growth, and why was this growth declining, it was declining because of the rising NPAs in the banking sector. When this (NDA) government came into office that figure was 4 lakh crore, it rose to 10.5 lakh crore by the middle of 2017 because under the previous RBI governor, Mr Rajan, they had identified mechanisms to identify stressed and non-performing assets which is why the banks stopped giving credit to industries," Kumar said.

Meanwhile, the Congress slammed Kumar for his commentdescribing it as "obnoxious and laughable".

"This is called blame game and shifting of the goal post. When UPA demitted power, NPAs were only 2 lakh 83 thousand crore which was controllable but now after 4 years of BJP rule, the NPAs are touching 12 lakh crore. Modi Government has itself given this data through a reply in parliament on 31st July 2018... Demonetisation disaster has led to a drop of 1.5 per cent in GDP causing a loss of two lakh twenty-five thousand crores," Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala noted.