Ex-finance secretary S C Garg criticized present finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and praised former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his blog post. He said that Jaitley’s focus on broader policy matters and left the running of the departments and implementation of policies to the secretaries.
“It was the best of the time personally and professionally to work with Shri Arun Jaitley,” he said. “Shri Arun Jaitley, with whom I spent most of my time in the Ministry of Finance, was a mastermind with an uncanny ability to sift through massive amounts of information and government files to discover the pith and substance of the public policy issue involved. He also had right temperament and ability to forge consensus. By devising the most acceptable solutions and then engendering wider acceptance for the same, Shri Jaitley was able to get solutions for most divisive and intractable solutions accepted by all. The GST [Goods and Services Tax] reforms are a case in point.”— Former Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg
Mr Garg has written in his blog that Mrs. Sitaraman asked for and insisted on my transfer from the Ministry of Finance in June 2019 itself, within one month of her taking over as FM.
He said that Sitharaman had a “different personality, knowledge endowment, skill-set and approach for economic policy issues” as well as for the officers working with her.
It became quite apparent very early that working with her was going to be quite difficult and it might not be conducive to undertaking necessary reforms for the attainment of the objective of building a $10 trillion economy of India.
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