Quality of public discourse big challenge in India: Jaitley

TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi/ A big challenge for India is to improve its understanding of issues and the quality of public discourse even as the country is gaining prominence as a major economic power, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday.

“One of the big challenges is even though we are growing as an economy compared to our counterparts in the world, we are the largest democracy with free expression, we still have to improve both our understanding of issues and the quality of public discourse,” Jaitley said here.

Addressing the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)’s conference on “Auditing and Accounting in a Digital Era”, he asked the state auditor to help improve the quality of discourse which needed to mature itself and rise above slogans and propaganda.

“I find these days the maximum comments come from people who only understand the issue on the surface without going down even to the first level,” he said. Jaitley said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) checks tax evasion and brings in more people in the tax net, demonetisation brings money operating outside the system into the banking system and the formalisation of the economy helps all who gets into it.