Don’t eat lizards, eat crow

A 70% hike in subsidies, a likely 1.5 percentage point hike in the fiscal deficit, a nervous rupee, plunging investment levels, and a Parliament that doesn’t function thanks to the combined weight of not just the Opposition but also the government’s allies … Worse, the government itself remains deeply divided on even the UPA’s flagship UIDAI project—while the finance minister is in favour of the UIDAI, the home ministry thinks UIDAI is eating into its turf (so when the standing committee has a problem with the UIDAI, we can blame the Opposition, or we can blame the government for not putting up a strong enough case for it—it’s probably a combination of both!) Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee is obviously right when he says, as he did in Parliament, the economy was in a difficult spot but things weren’t so bad that we shall have to start eating lizards, but the 6.5-7% growth we’re looking at now is a far cry from the 9% the finance minister was projecting just 10 months ago. And things are only going to get worse from here on.

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