Trying to counter his critics on India's slowing economy, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal made a gaffe by invoking Einstein for the Theory of Gravity, which was propounded by Isaac Newton.
“Don’t go by all the calculations you see on TV, that if the country has to become a $5 trillion economy, it will have to grow at 12% but right now it is currently growing at 6-7%”.
“Don’t get into those maths. Maths never helped Einstein discover gravity,” Goyal said immediately after the Board of Trade meeting as he tried to defend the government’s projection of economic growth, which it believes can make India a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25.
Continuing his rant, Goyal said if Einstein had only gone by structured formulae and what was past knowledge, there would have been no innovation in this world.
Goyal's comments came close on the heels of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman saying the auto sales were down due to millennials preferring to ride by Ola and Uber.
“The automobile and components industry has been affected by the implementation of BS-VI norms and the mindsets of millennials who now prefer to ride by Ola and Uber rather than committing to buying an automobile,” Sitharaman has said in Chennai earlier this week.
After two back-to-back sub-6% GDP acceleration, most of the rating agencies and global banks have lowered their growth projection for the Indian economy in 2019-20.
While Moody's has cut its GDP forecast for India to 6.2%, domestic rating agency Crisil has lowered it to 6.3% after the economy slumped to a six-year low of 5% in the April-June quarter of FY20.
The Reserve Bank of India too revised its estimates downward to 6.9% from an earlier 7%.
Economists, however, believe that to become a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25, India needs to grow at least at 9% every year.
This is not the first gaffe by Goyal in the current year. Earlier in February, he was called out for sharing a video of a "high-speed" train that turned out to be a time-lapse of a slower train. At that time he was minister for railways.