New Delhi: Extremist ideologies, political or economic, are harmful, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here Friday, while expressing confidence that "India can and will survive the global economic crisis".
Speaking at the HT Leadership Summit, the prime minister had earlier said that India will be a land of free, knowledge-empowered people.
He congratulated the country's scientists who had put the first Indian probe on the moon earlier this month.
India will weather the economic storm and be able to sustain 8 per cent growth
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh exuded confidence that India “can and will survive” the current global financial crisis to sustain an eight per cent economic growth and promised every possible measure to promote development and entrepreneurship.
"We cannot pretend that we are not affected by the global economic crisis. We are all affected by it," the prime minister told the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit at the Taj Palace hotel here.
"But we can and will survive this crisis and emerge stronger," he said, adding: "No instrument of public policy will be spared - fiscal, monetary, exchange rate or public investment will all be deployed to ensure an environment conducive to growth and entrepreneurship."
He said, “We can and will sustain an eight per cent growth.”
Referring to the recent G20 Summit in Washington on the current global economic crisis, which he attended at the invitation of US President George W Bush, the prime minister said his message there was that developing countries, too, had a role to play in finding a solution to the problems.
“I urged world leaders to recognise these inter-dependencies and our stake in it. We need a global safety net so that the poor of the world do not pay a price for the profligacy of the rich, and the delinquency of a few,” he said.
The need to put 'heads' together
“Global problems require global solutions. This is the most important lesson of the past century for the next. But global institutions of governance must be made more inclusive and representative. The voice of the developing world must be heard in the high councils of global decision-making,” he said.
“Our century will be shaped by how we respond to the global economic crisis today. If nations look only inwards and imagine they can solve their problems on their own, they will fail,” he said.
“The world has become more integrated and inter-dependent. In both good and bad, in prosperity and peril, in opportunity and crisis we must recognise the new inter-dependencies. No nation is an island unto itself.”
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