I particularly heard the criticism about the IMF and the World Bank; and their office bearers visit to India and meetings with our people. If at all they wanted to influence us, it was not necessary to undertake all the journey from Washington to Delhi and have dinners and interviews with the Ministers here. You can influence from anywhere. But the question is what is the system working in the world? You may not accept it or you may not like it, but the point is that even U. N. has created certain institutional arrangements in the world today and India is participating in them in the last 35 years; we participated in that; the other Government which was here also participated in that system. There was nothing wrong in it. But some of the people for the ideological reasons do not mentally accept those institutional arrangements that are functioning today; may be those institution arrangements have their own weaknesses they have got certain weak points. There is some situation in which they work against the third world. We had said those things openly when the opportunities had occurred to us, on the forums of the World Bank and the IMF that there are some drawbacks of the system and they should be remedied.
But shall we not take an advantage of certain useful facilities that are created there? In the last decade, in 1972 when the oil crisis exploded on the world, everybody was taken a back. On behalf of the then Government, not this Government I would say, the previous government of Mrs. Gandhi, I had attended those conferences and saw even the representatives of socialist countries because there are some socialist countries sitting in those forums; even they were rather worried about what the future of this world going to be.
Suppose we do not borrow from it. I am not very particular about borrowing from this Institution. Let us take, for example, that we have decided not to borrow; if the Parliament decides on the advice of this Memorandum that we should not borrow from it, then where shall we go? Shall we not make any arrangement for our foreign exchange gap? Shall we merely say, sorry we can not get anything so stop your business, stop agriculture because of no more fertilizer, no more petroleum product, stop all activities because we have decided on principle not to borrow money from any institution. Is there any option? What is the alternative? What is the use of merely, telling what is happening is West Bengal? When the Prime Minister said about the lack of alternative she talked about a national alternative, not pointing out about any one particular State. (Interruptions) Even what you said about your achievements, I do not grudge about your achievements. Whatever your achievements are, certainly if they are good they are good, but do not suppose that the others have not done that, West Bengal has done something about the land ceiling etc. Many other States have also done something for the last 20 years. You do not know about these things. (Interruptions.) You do not know what it they started this question of law on ceiling, etc. (Interruptions) Therefore, the point that I was making was if at all you want to assess the budget, you must certainly take into consideration certain realities, internal realities and international realities. If you do that, then possibly you will be able to understand What the Finance Minister has done to our economy. I said and I repeat it that the Finance Minister has certainly done many things in this budget to strengthen the process of making our economy viable in terms of internal and international factors. This is an achievement that must be accpeted. But unfortunately, these realities are not taken into consideration when criticisms are made. I would... (Interruptions)
