People converting black money into white not to be spared, says Arun Jaitley

The government wants to establish a 'new normal' without any space for black money in the Indian economic system, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday. "Black money has been a norm in India for seven decades, we want to confront it and create a new normal," Jaitley said at the Hindustan Times Leadership summit in the capital.  He said the demonetisation move would ensure that political funding become "transparent".  Jaitley said demonetisation was one of many steps that government was planning to take to transform the economy while pitching the case for GST. "If we don't have the GST, we can have no tax at all, it's a "constitutional compulsion" to implement the GST by September." he said.  "Demonetisation plus GST means bigger economy, and higher and better GDP," Jaitley added.  He said both the moves will lead to a cleaner tax system in the country. He also stressed that India will continue to be fastest growing major economy in world like last year.  However, Jaitley also issued a warning to the states that were opposed to economic reforms. "Investors will be wary of some states seen on wrong side of reforms," he said. On the cash crunch, the Finance Minister said, "When we are covering such a large population, there will be queues." Defending the move, he said, "One of the advantages of this exercise will be that there won't be the same level of paper currency as there was on November 8."

"The volume of formal trade, volume of business will grow but paper currency will shrink." "A year from now, India will be a larger economy with higher GDP, cleaner GDP, reasonable interest rate." He added, however, that people have cooperated tremendously. "You don't find a social unrest in the country," he said.