Kind of cleaning govt did after 2014 'unbelievable': Nirmala Sitharaman

Prime Minister Narendra Modi believed that India was at a stage where good transformational changes were required instead of incremental changes, the Finance Minister said while delivering the Nani Palkhivala Memorial Lecture on "Road Map to $5 Trillion Economy" in Chennai.

However, those changes were not easy to bring about without cleaning the system, despite criticism that the government was not introducing reforms, she said.

"But still one might say in the last five years the government never did. That can be a critical analysis and I am fully willing to buy that. Because post 2014, the kind of cleaning up the government had to do was unbelievable and we undertook that exercise without a grudge without a worry. We had to do it and it is part of the game," she was quoted as saying by NDTV.

She said the government should be the facilitator, resourceful and make policies where they are lacking.

"Abhaav and dabaav both of which are not desirable. Abhaav is the inadequacy or lack of adequate presence or shortfall. You do not need a shortfall. You need a government where it should be present, where it is expected to function," NDTV quoted her.

Commenting on Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code(IBC), she said its aim was not to shut businesses but ensure the entities that exploited the business couldn't make back door entries.

"IBC does not end up treating a company closed or bankrupt. It takes on the approach in having some kind of resolution where all people who exploited the company do not come back through the 'back door,'" the news organisation quoted her saying.

IBC was aimed at providing better management to a company and keep it "alive and kicking", she said.

Speaking about India's roadmap to $ 5 trillion economy, she said it was not just an abstraction, and the government was reaching out to stakeholders at micro levels too to achieve the goal.

"The point I am trying to make on this road to $5 trillion economy is that it is not just an abstraction, this is not how I want India to be. But in micro level too, we are coming in response to every stakeholder," she said.