NEW DELHI: Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog Rajiv Kumar has termed the ongoing situation in the financial sector as unprecedented and called for extraordinary steps to tackle it. He said this while addressing the Hero Mindmine summit on Thursday.  "This is an unprecedented situation for the government. In the last 70 years, we have not faced this sort of liquidity situation where the entire financial sector is in a churn, and nobody is trusting anybody else," Kumar said.

"Within the private sector, nobody wants to lend to anybody else. Everyone is sitting on cash," he said while speaking on Thursday at the Mindmine Summit 2019, the flagship event of the Hero Group.

Kumar said the government must do whatever it can to remove apprehensions of the private sector. "The whole nature of the game has changed in the past four years after demonetisation, GST and IBC. In the earlier period, you had 10, 20, 30, 35 per cent of cash sloshing around which used to help people. That has become much less now," he said.

After his statement on the current liquidity crisis made headline, Kumar, however, claimed that he's been misinterpreted by the media.

I would request the media to stop misinterpreting my statement, he posted on Twitter on Friday. "The government has been taking bold steps to accelerate our economy & will continue to do so. There is no need to panic or spread panic," he said.


"The cassendras should now accept that the government is well on top of the situation and will do all it can to revive the 'animal spirits' in the economy," Kumar added.

(With inputs from ANI)