Lurking Foreign Exchange Crisis

THE crisis facing the country on the external economic front this year is no less serious than the one on the domestic front, resulting from uncontrolled inflation, artificial shortages of consumption goods and erosion of investible resources. The gravity of the balance of payments situation has not been adequately recognised yet, mainly because attention has been focused on the mounting mass unrest on account of the shortages of items of daily consumption and their continually spiralling prices. If, however, the next harvest and the one -after that turn out to be reasonably good, the domestic economic situation may get somewhat stabilised and become less of a preoccupation with the policy-makers; but the external sector is unlikely to show similar improvement.