With such ministers, only God can fix economy: Ramesh on Goyal’s gravity comment

PTI, Sep 13, 2019, 10:34 AM IST

New Delhi: Taking a swipe at Union Minister Piyush Goyal for his comments that maths did not help Albert Einstein discover gravity while speaking on the government’s target of USD 5 trillion economy, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Thursday said with such ministers around, only God can fix the economy.

The commerce and industry minister was trolled on the Internet on Thursday over an apparent gaffe in explaining that achieving the target of nearly doubling the size of the economy to USD 5 trillion should not be looked through the prism of maths.

In a tweet, Ramesh said, “Yes, Mr. Minister. Einstein did not need maths to discover gravity since Newton already had. Now wait for HRD Minister to say that long before Newton our ancients knew all about gravity (or has he already?) With such ministers, only God can #FixTheEconomy (sic).”

At a meeting of the Board of Trade, Goyal said, “Do not get into the calculations that you see on television…Oh if you are looking at USD 5 trillion economy, the country will have to grow at 12 per cent, today it is growing at 6-7 per cent.”

“Do not get into those maths. Those maths have never helped Einstein discover gravity. If he had only gone by structured formulae and what was past knowledge, I do not think there would have been any innovation in this world,” he said while wrongly attributing the discover of gravity to renowned scientist Einstein.
The slip up was not lost on the netizens who quickly took to Twitter to point out that gravity was discovered by Isaac Newton and Einstein is credited for his theory of relativity. Some even made fun of the minister’s statement.

This came within days of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman blaming millennials’ preference for ride-hailing services such as Uber and Ola over owning cars, and not high taxes, for slumping vehicle sales.

The Congress had hit out at Sitharaman saying that it reflected the “inefficiency, immaturity, and inexperience” of the BJP in governance and demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologise for it.