Government aiming to bring fiscal deficit down to 4 percent
September 23rd, 2009 - 4:04 pm ICT by IANS
Kolkata, Sep 23 (IANS) Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee Wednesday said the government planned to scale down fiscal deficit to 4 percent by 2012.
“We should try to bring down the fiscal deficit to 5 percent in 2011 and 4 percent by 2012,” Mukherjee said in an address at the 155th annual general meeting of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry here.
India’s fiscal deficit is around 6.8 percent.
Asked how he proposed to bring down the fiscal deficit, he said there would be no requirement for stimulus packages once the global economic situation looked up, which would help in “revenue upswing”.
“During the budget, we took a tremendous risk by raising development outlay by 39 percent knowing fully well the resulting fiscal deficit was not sustainable,” Mukherjee said.
Referring to the additional outgo on account of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations, he added: “The level of expenditure will be much higher than normal expenditure. Due to the fiscal concession there has been a revenue shortfall.”
Talking about stimulus packages, Mukherjee said: “There was a proposal in the G20 finance ministers’ meeting to work out the exit strategy for stimulus packages given to all the nations.
“But we are not recommending exit strategy right now. We should wait till the recovery of the world economy for exit strategy.”
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Tags: annual general meeting, bengal, budget, chamber of commerce, chamber of commerce and industry, commission recommendations, concession, exit strategy, finance minister, fiscal deficit, g20 finance ministers, global economic situation, India, outlay, pranab mukherjee, proposal, revenue shortfall, stimulus, upswing, world economy
