india

Updated: Jul 13, 2020 00:44 IST

A day after Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal panned views of Economics Nobel winner Abhijit Banerjee, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said the BJP ministers, rather than worrying about the economy, were busy discrediting the achievements of others.

“The economy is collapsing, but they are busy running a comedy circus,” tweeted the Congress leader in Hindi.

She also tagged a media report which claimed that the slowdown in the auto sector continued in September.

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India’s passenger vehicle sales slumped 23.7% in September, the eleventh straight month of declines, prompting an industry body to flag more job cuts if sales failed to pick up soon. Car and auto component makers have cut thousands of jobs and halted some production as the industry grapples with various challenges amid a broader economic slowdown. The government stepped in last month, announcing a corporate tax rate to boost manufacturing and lift growth.

Congratulating Abhijit Banerjee, who received the Nobel in Economics this Monday, Goyal said, “I first congratulate Banerjee for his Nobel award in economics. But you know his views and ideology. He belongs to Left ideology which has been rejected in India.”

In a recent presentation, Banerjee argued that the Indian economy was doing “very badly” and it was “going into a tailspin”.

Banerjee had supported ‘NYAY’, a minimum income scheme proposed by the Congress. The ‘NYAY’ scheme was one of the highlights of the Congress manifesto for the April-May Lok Sabha polls.

The minister has been at the receiving end of criticism, most recently for his “maths never helped Einstein discover gravity” remark.

That error - crediting Einstein for the concept of gravity propounded by Isaac Newton who was born more than two centuries earlier -- made Goyal the target of many barbs.

Goyal ended up apologising for the same and said: “Mistakes are made by everybody and I’m not one of them who is scared of making a mistake.”

Just last week, Goyal’s fellow colleague and Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad highlighted the “huge business” done by three movies released on single day to underscore the “soundness” of the Indian economy.

Facing backlash, the minister, expressing regret, clarified that a part of his statement was “twisted out of context”.

In September, it was Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman who was at the receiving end of jokes when she blamed mindset of millennials as one of the reasons for the slowdown in the automobile sector. “Some studies do tell us that mindset of millennials, who are now preferring not to commit an EMI (equated monthly installment) for buying an automobile, instead prefer to take Ola, Uber, everything else, or take the metro,” she said.