At SRCC, Jaitley urges students to be on fast track

NEW DELHI: “Our defence preparedness is the best guarantee for peace in the area. Unless we are prepared there will be no peace in India. We have a disturbed neighbourhood,” said minister of defence, finance and corporate affairs, Arun Jaitley. He was speaking at a youth meet organized by Shri Ram College of Commerce on Thursday. The minister, who is also an alumnus of the college, was felicitated.
Jaitley rued the fact that things have stagnated for long and said that it’s time to have less of state control for the economy to be back on track. “What we started in 1991, I only wish we started a decade or two early to unleash the energy. And the process of unleashing the energy of the country is to allow the people to grow, to conduct businesses and let them decide their own destiny. In the 90s why is that IT as an area grew? The reason was the state had no role. There was no Act from Parliament which regulated the sector, no permission which was required. And that had been the lesson for this country,” he said.
“In the last few years we have slowed down as a country. This is a challenge now to pick up once again. A country which has the potential and had been growing at 8% and 9% annually is suddenly down to 5% mode. As a consequence there is less job opportunities, the manufacturing sector has shrunk…our revenue collections go down and thereby our capacity as a state to look after expansion of infrastructure, services of poverty alleviation scheme goes down,” added Jaitley.
Stating the telecom revolution as a living success story to change the conventional idea of governance the minister said prior to opening up, telecom was a state monopoly.
Jaitley also said, “If you are able to enter the fast track in the early stage in life then the kind of achievement which you can reach is something which is unthinkable.”