Direction (): Read the passage and choose the correct word/set of words to fill the blanks.
Hope and fear are marching in lockstep. The arrival of the vaccines represents the ______ A1 _______ (gloom, murk, dawn) of hope. Yet, fears about mutations of the virus and how politics, which defines public policy, will mutate loom large across India’s political economy. Political rhetoric propels public expectations and the declaration by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently of “a budget which is a budget like never before” will be tested against a billion aspirations. The challenge of ______A2 _______ (revival, amelioration, droop) and recovery is located in a parade of riveting contrasts. India, it is useful to remember, migrated from slowdown to lockdown. The contrast between the message beamed by stock indices and indices of the real economy are striking to say the least. In the period post the high of 2016-17, growth has _______ A3________ (limped, slid, stumped) consistently and stock valuations have risen just as consistently. GDP growth slid from 8-plus per cent to hover at around 4 per cent to a contraction in the wake of the pandemic, while the benchmark Sensex has shot up from around 29,000 points to over 47,000 points. How has the fall in growth impacted government _______ A4 _______ (expenditure, asset, revenues)? In theory, drop in output would result in drop in revenues. That though is not necessarily true in the Indian context. This week, the government informed India that the Goods and Services Tax collections “for December 2020 recorded all time high since implementation of GST”. Even as the economy is in what is called a technical recession, which translates into two quarters of negative growth, GST collections which averaged at around Rs 90,000 crore since August 2017, touched the new high of Rs 1.15,174 crore for the month of December. GST revenues grew even as the economy _______ A5 _______ (shrank, dwindled, aggrandized) 7.5 per cent in the July-Sept 2020 period.
It is not just the Dalal Street vs Main Street picture or the GDP vs GST revenues imagery which are curious. Conventional economics ________ A6 _________ (postulates, ionates, charges ) a correlation between inflation and interest rates. Consumer Price Inflation, which was under 3 per cent in 2017, has seen a secular rise now touching 7.5 per cent. The RBI’s policy rates though have slid from over 6.5 per cent to 5.15 per cent in 2019 to 4 per cent in 2020. This column has previously highlighted the _________ A7 ________ ( phenomenon, movement, criteria ) affecting savers. Interest rates for depositors with money in a savings account halved to 3 per cent — a 365-day deposit now fetches what the savings account used to.