Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy has called for doing away with personal income tax, combating corruption, making agriculture in the country more productive, making credit cheaper for the MSME sector, encouraging savings and repatriating black money held by Indians abroad to help Indian economy grow faster.

He said the Indian economy should grow faster and it could make it with the desired steps being taken. Agriculture, he said, must get top priority now. The economic model adopted after Independence tended to sideline and squeezed the farm sector, he said.

He was speaking on the state of Indian economy at a pre-Budget discussion, organised by the Kochi campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, here on Saturday.

Dr. Swamy said the services sector was growing faster than the primary and secondary sectors and that the situation was more skewed than the numbers projected.

There was a disconnect between the Reserve Bank of India and the Union Finance Ministry.

The disconnect must end, he said. While the RBI wanted to keep interest rates high to check inflation, the economy needed cheaper funds, he said. The prime lending rate should be something in the vicinity of nine per cent rather than the present 12 per cent, he said.

He also said the government must encourage domestic savings because the Indian economy and the capital market would be fuelled by the money from within the country rather than by foreign investors.

Dr. Swamy said by his estimate, black money held by Indians abroad was around Rs. 120 lakh crore. If the money can be repatriated it would amount to more than the collection of personal income tax in the country.

He also pointed out that there was a strange situation in which Indian Rupee depreciated against the US dollar and, at the same time, exports and imports came down. This is not what normally happens in an economy, he said.