Political parties should come together to put country first: Narayana Murthy

N R Narayana Murthy, chairman-emeritus of Infosys Technologies, the third largest software services exporter, has called on the country’s politicians to come together and put the country first.

“There is a need to have strong policy reforms. Political parties should come together and put the country first,” he said while addressing an event in Bangalore on Friday.

He expressed a concern that India had not lived up to the expectation of an 8 per cent gross domestic product or GDP growth. However, he also said that other countries were also suffering the impact of the global downturn.

The Reserve Bank in its First Quarter Review of Monetary Policy on July 31, 2012, revised downwards its growth projection for 2012-13 to 6.5 per cent from 7.3 per cent. Analysts are revising India growth targets even further to below 6 per cent. The downward revision mainly reflects drought impact on agricultural output and contraction in the industrial production during the quarter to June 2012.

On Thursday, Reserve Bank of India in its annual report said that in absence of signs of global conditions improving, the burden of adjustment would have to be borne by domestic policies.

“Structural impediments impacting business confidence need to be addressed immediately. This is particularly true of the mining and infrastructure sectors. With limited fiscal and monetary space available to provide a direct stimulus to domestic growth, an expenditure switching policy is needed that reduces government’s revenue spending by cutting subsidies and using the resources so released to step up public capital expenditures,” RBI said in its report.