The Centre will present a white paper on the alleged mismanagement of the economy that happened prior to 2014, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her interim Budget speech on Thursday.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government came to power at the Centre in May 2014 after a decade-long rule by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

“In 2014, when our government assumed the reins, the responsibility to mend the economy step by step and to put the governance systems in order was enormous,” Sitharaman said. “The need of the hour was to give hope to the people, to attract investments, and to build support for the much-needed reforms.”

The finance minister claimed that her government was successful in implementing those economic reforms.

Sitharaman also said that the “crisis” of the years before the BJP came to power, has been overcome and the country’s economy is “firmly on a high sustainable growth path with all-round development”.

“It is now appropriate to look at where we were then till 2014 and where we are now, only for the purpose of drawing lessons from the mismanagement of those years,” she said. “The government will lay a white paper on [the] table of the House [Lok Sabha].”

A white paper is an in-depth report on a topic that investigates the problem and suggests solutions.

Sitharaman presented the interim Budget in Parliament on Thursday outlining the estimated revenue and expenditure of the Union government for financial year 2024-’25.

With the term of the BJP-led government ending in coming months, a full Budget for the next fiscal will likely be presented in July, after a new government is sworn in.

Interim Budgets typically do not include significant policy changes or announcements of new major schemes.

Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge told reporters on Thursday that the BJP government often talks about what happened before 2014 but never talks about its own performance.

“They should give a comparative statement listing the promises they made and implemented,” Kharge said. “But they have never done this. They always talk about what happened before 2014 because they feel that the country got independence in 2014.”

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