BENGALURU, India, June 14: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday said India faces risks from rising crude prices, tensions in West Asia, and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has ensured there is “not a supply disruption” for households and the economy.
She made the remarks at the Viksit Bharat event in Bengaluru while outlining India’s economic growth story.
Speaking on geopolitical challenges, Sitharaman said, “Even with the Middle East crisis and the disruptions it causes, there are risks and challenges. It is not just the cost of crude, it is not just the cost of LPG, it is also the problems that any country faces.”
She detailed shipping pressures linked to the Hormuz region, saying, “You don’t get ships. The liners are not available because they don’t want to come with their costly ships and get them shot at. They don’t have containers to come into the ports of others. Insurance companies don’t want to insure. So, for an empty vessel to go, insurance has gone up because the ship could be fired at. When it comes filled with crude, again, both the crude and the ship push insurance premiums higher.”
“Despite all these challenges, Prime Minister Modi is ensuring that there shall not be a supply disruption. So that’s the kind of attention to the economy. That’s the kind of attention toward households,” the BJP leader and union minister said.
On economic growth, Sitharaman pushed back against criticism of India’s performance.
“There is no disaster awaiting India. On the contrary, quarter after quarter, year after year, we are not just saying that we are the fastest-growing economy; the numbers support it. You have the IMF saying it in April and May during its spring assessment, and again in October, when updated data show why India remains the fastest-growing economy next year and beyond. Year after year after 2020,” she said.
She cited welfare and poverty data as evidence of economic progress and said that 250 million Indians had emerged from multidimensional poverty, with extreme poverty declining from 29.17 percent in 2013-14 to 11.28 percent. She added that 120 million households had received toilets and that rural tap water connections had risen from 32.3 million in 2019 to 158.5 million.
Sitharaman said the government is balancing infrastructure development with human development despite global headwinds.
“We have not missed out on the human elements as much as the infrastructure elements,” she said, adding that the government’s 12-year record is a story of both development and welfare while navigating crude and logistics risks.
The finance minister outlined three “global-standard” revolutions currently reshaping India.
The first, she said, is the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) revolution. Sitharaman described Bengaluru as the heart of the DPI movement and noted that the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity has achieved 580 million Jan Dhan accounts and 1.44 billion Aadhaar identities.
“UPI today processes 2.1 billion transactions per month. No other country has achieved this scale. Eighty-six percent of person-to-merchant payments are below Rs 500, showing that even street vendors in Shivaji Nagar are using the same digital rail as tech workers in Whitefield,” she said.
Second, she highlighted the “formalization revolution,” noting that GST registrations have increased from 6.65 million in 2017 to 16.4 million. Additionally, 310 million unorganized sector workers have registered on the e-Shram portal, and Mudra loans worth Rs 40 lakh crore have been sanctioned, 66 percent of which have gone to women.
She also spoke about the welfare revolution through what she called “saturation,” emphasizing a shift from merely launching schemes to ensuring that every eligible person is covered.
She cited 158.5 million rural tap water connections, 105 million free LPG connections under the Ujjwala scheme, and 810 million citizens receiving free food grains.
About The Author
