The opposition today rejected finance minister Pranab Mukherjee's contention that high growth was responsible for the rising prices and said that growth which leads to inflation was not acceptable.
"If higher growth rate means high inflation, we don't want such a growth. We reject such a growth," former finance minister and BJP member Yashwant Sinha said initiating the the debate on supplementary demands for grants that sought Parliament's nod for an additional expenditure of Rs 54,588 crore during the current fiscal.
Sinha said this in response to Mukherjee's contention yesterday that high growth rate, among other things, was also responsible for rising prices. "With high growth there has to be inflationary pressure," the finance minister had said.
In his spirited address, which was interrupted by Congress members several times, Sinha quoted statistics for the past 10 years to prove that there was no relationship between growth and inflation rates.
He said that while growth during 2009-10 rose to 7.2% from 6.7% in the previous year, inflation in the same period declined to 1.6% from 8.4%.
"I completely discard that theory. Nobody is going to buy that theory," he said, adding, the high government expenditure incurred in the past few years in the name of saving the economy from the global financial meltdown was responsible for spurt in prices.
"This money (public expenditure to boost demand) went into corruption. It was not consumption expenditure but corruption expenditure," he said criticising the government for raising fiscal deficit while ignoring the targets spelt out in the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act.
Sinha was also critical of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) and described the scheme as "factory of corruption."
The MNREGA scheme is not working well anywhere, but has become a "fountainhead of corruption", he said, adding the government had allocated Rs 40,000 crore for the programme in the budget.
