Economic Survey Bats for More Deregulation to Drive Growth of Firms, Economy

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Economic Survey 2024-25 in the parliament on Friday. The survey pushed for more deregulation and highlighted the need to give more economic freedom to individuals and organisations to drive growth. 

“To succeed with structural reforms, a fundamental pre-requisite is to accelerate and amplify the deregulation agenda...work towards giving people back their agency and enhancing the economic freedoms of individuals and organisations,” the survey said. 

It stated that the economic roadmap of the government towards deregulation in the past decade through various policies that aimed to bring structural reforms, would be futile if more freedom isn’t given to businesses to scale up. 

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Additionally, it raised concern both for the government and the firms when businesses don’t scale up. By remaining small, the businesses encourage a parallel informal economy and manage to remain outside the regulatory purview of the government, including the labour and safety laws. They also harm themselves as they lose out on access to institutional capital, skilled labour and advanced technology adoption. 

India Needs to Redouble Export 

The increasing uncertainty around the world in the past few years has resulted in severe economic implications, particularly with trade routes being impacted by the wars in the countries, Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine. The survey highlighted the need for India to become resilient by pushing on the domestic front. India needs to double down on its efforts to boost exports and attract foreign investments, the report stated. 

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To encourage investments, the economic survey has pointed out the need for deregulation by “liberalising standards and controls and designing policy” to minimise burden of running businesses in the country, both for individuals and organisations.