Rama Krishna Sangem
Controversial businessman Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani Group, has praised both the Congress government of 1991 and present PM Narendra Modi for the economic reforms in India. Interestingly, Rahul Gandhi, present leader of Congress often attacks Adani as friend of PM Modi and says this BJP government was only interested in helping a few big business houses in the country.
But, Adani on June 19 Wednesday lauded the 1991 reforms, initiated during the Congress rule, as the foundation and runway of India’s economic progress. He also termed the post-2014 tenure as the ‘take-off’. “If the period between 1991 and 2014 was about putting down the foundations and building the runway, the period from 2014 to 2024 has been about the aircraft taking off,” Adani said.
Adani was speaking at a closed-door CRISIL Infrastructure Summit, held in Mumbai on Wednesday. In the audience was a varied group of executives from financial and non-financial institutions, with common investment interest in India’s infrastructure sector.
1991, watershed for India
“The reforms announced by the late Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and the finance minister at that time, Dr Manmohan Singh, marked a watershed moment in India’s economic history,” Adani said. Indirectly, he was saying that without PV and Manmohan, the acceleration of growth claimed by Modi would not have been possible.
In 1991, India’s then central government under the Congress rule, introduced a slew of economic reforms aimed at liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. Adani termed the year 1991 and its reforms as a major turning point. The billionaire’s own coal-to-airport conglomerate started operations as a trading company in 1988.
Adani attributed the quality of ‘governance’ as the single most important catalyst enabling the (economic) take-off witnessed over the past decade.
Along with India’s economic journey, Asia’s second-richest billionaire also traced that of his own conglomerate, noting that over the past 30 years, the group has leveraged these drivers to become global and national market leaders in multiple sectors across energy, cement, and infrastructure.
Despite the success across these sectors, Adani highlighted infrastructure to enable energy transition and digital infrastructure as the two emerging ones and termed them trillion-dollar opportunities. “Nothing holds more potential than the energy transition space and the digital infrastructure space.” Adani also reiterated his group’s plans to invest $100 billion in the next ten years in the energy transition space.
Why he is saying this now?
Adani for the first time in recent times has openly credited the Congress for success of economic reforms in the country. All these 10 years of BJP regime at the Centre, he is seen as a friend of Modi and Amit Shah. Why he’s saying this now? Some experts say, Adani wants to be friends with Congress and INDIA block whose strength in the Lok Sabha has gone up to 233 MPs and their support is important for any major economic policy decisions of the Modi government.
