Former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said inflation in India is not going to be reduced any time soon, thanks to the wrong policies of the United Progressive Alliance Government, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
"You can't take a patient to a bad doctor and let the patient's condition deteriorate, and then ask another doctor to save the patient, when he is about to die," Sinha said.
He was responding to a question by rediff.com on the sidelines of a day-long India business conference at the Columbia University, in New York on Sunday.
"There is nothing that can be done at present (to contain inflation)," Sinha said.
He said that the government should have woken up long time ago and not now when the situation is out of control.
"I would say that the import duties should have been reduced six months ago, not so late. They should have got more wheat may be last year when the prices were down and not today when the prices are very high. This crisis has been brought about by the wrong policies of the government," he said.
The former minister of the National Democratic Alliance headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party said that he had contained inflation during his tenure, something that he described as one of the greatest achievements of his time because the government did not allow any crisis to come up.
"It is all in the public domain, not something we secretly did. The government of the day did not take control of inflation," he said, adding that the present government has done very little at this point of time to contain inflation.
Earlier in his keynote speech, Sinha had pointed out that in the 1990s the Congress party government tried to take a textbook approach to containing inflation by tightening the monetary policy to control the raging inflation.
While that government came down over a period of time, so did the growth rate he noted in a seemingly sarcastic vein.
"I was able to contain inflation through a mix of fiscal and administrative measures," he claimed.
