Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday that the government would ensure the desired policy push and credit availability for India’s informal sector–which has long been the backbone of economic activity–to help them scale up, while enabling the formal sector to pursue its own growth potential.
Addressing students at a Kerala college, the finance minister asserted that India is on the “cusp of change” and even areas like space and atomic energy–once the preserve of the public sector–have now been opened up for private players, creating immense opportunities.
Weeks before the presentation of the Interim Budget for FY25 on February 1, Sitharaman said “managing finances is about managing priorities” and the Narendra Modi government has always kept up the focus on the poor and the vulnerable.
At the same time, the government’s aim has also been to raise adequate resources to fund expenditure without burdening taxpayers much and to plug pilferages in the public delivery system, she added.
Sitharaman called on students and youth to be not just job seekers but also job creators, taking advantage of the country’s enormous potential. This way, they will not just benefit from but also contribute to the country’s bid to emerge as a developed country by 2047, she added.
There is no need to rush to any other country for better standards of living as India can well provide quality life to its citizens, she said.
In a response to a student’s query as to how she manages finances of a country of about 1.5 billion people, Sitharaman said: “It is a question of prioritizing where the money should go and for what purpose it goes and whether it is going efficiently and if there are any pilferages.” Once the firsts among the priorities are addressed, the next set of priorities are looked into, she said.
“More important for a government and for a finance minister is also the task of efficient collection of revenue. And if there are new ways in which I can generate resources without burdening the citizens, I need to do that as well,” she said.
The minister also advised against assessing the economy only through the prism of the formalisation, highlighting the dominant role of the informal sector in shaping the Indian economy historically, which continues until today. The informal activities, for long, served domestic demand and the government would continue to offer the desired assistance to such informal players to grow, she added.
