The Congress on Friday latched onto the statement of Niti Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar about the crisis in the economy, pointing out that the “admission of failure” had come after a long phase of mismanagement and denial.

Rahul Gandhi tweeted: “The Government’s own economic advisers have finally acknowledged what we cautioned for long — India’s economy is in a deep mess. Now, accept our solution and remonetise the economy, by putting money back in the hands of the needy & not the greedy.”

Niti Aayog vice-chairman Kumar had said at a programme earlier that the government was facing “an unprecedented situation”.

“In the last 70 years, we have not faced this sort of a liquidity situation where the entire financial sector is in a churn, and nobody is trusting anybody else. Within the private sector, nobody wants to lend to anybody else. Everyone is sitting on cash. I think the government must do whatever it can to take away some of the apprehensions for the private sector.”

After the Opposition projected his statement as an admission of failure, Kumar tweeted on Friday: “I would request the media to stop misinterpreting my statement. 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.”

Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari told a media conference that Kumar deserved to be “congratulated for his confession”.

“This confession requires a slight amendment. It is not just the financial sector, it is the Indian economy. The current situation in the Indian economy is unprecedented. Something of that sort has not been seen in the past 70 years and much that the NDA-BJP government would like us to believe that this is because of Jawaharlal Nehru, unfortunately, that is not the case. This is the making of the NDA-BJP government in the past five years,” Tiwari said.

The Congress leader said over 3 crore people were facing the threat of job loss.

“Every sector of the economy is under grave stress. The textile industry has been putting out advertisements on a daily basis now for the past one week explaining that this is perhaps the worst period the sector has seen in the past seven decades.

“The tea industry is facing an unprecedented crisis. Even the innerwear industry is in a crisis. Parle-G — the biscuit manufacturer — today announced that they are laying off 10,000 people. The rupee as of today morning had crashed to Rs 72.03 against the dollar,” Tiwari said.

The Congress also criticised finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman for saying that the economy was in trouble because of global factors.

In a series of tweets after the finance minister announced several measures to boost market sentiments, the Congress said: “The minister says India’s economy is down because of global situation, conveniently ignoring the simultaneous destruction by demonetisation & GST. She may have also forgotten that in 2008 during the global recession, our economy remained stable because of Manmohan Singh’s policies.

“India is in dire need of a Finance Minister with a basic understanding of economics. Our growth rate may be higher than the US & China, but they are $21 trillion & $14.8 trillion economies, respectively, we are $2.8 trillion. You cannot make a growth rate comparison without looking at base levels. The minister has backtracked on several provisions presented in her maiden budget. Only thing that remained the same: No mention of job creation then, no mention today either.”