'Need to hear’: Kiren Rijiju shares NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's big praise for India's IT growth amid GDP row

Union parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday shared a video of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang praising India's IT growth and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's focus on artificial intelligence.

In the video, Huang is heard saying, “India is one of the world’s leading IT industries, and this is the beginning of a new IT platform.”

He added that he talked to Modi a decade back about artificial intelligence and that he was excited to see how Indian startups will build a local AI economy.

“I had the benefit of seeing Modi ji a decade ago talking about AI. I’m really anxious and very excited to see local companies and startups in India starting to take advantage of this technology, contribute to it, and build a local AI economy,” he said.

Also read: ‘Few jobless people call themselves economists’: Piyush Goyal jibes at Oppn, critics over ‘wrong GDP’ remark

In the caption of the post, Rijiju said that “some Indian Politicians need to hear this” in an indirect jibe at the Opposition amid row over India's GDP growth.

India recorded GDP growth of 7.8% in the April-June quarter amid concerns of an economic downturn over the war in West Asia. However, a row erupted over the figure after former finance secretary of the Government of India, Subhash Chandra Garg argued in an interview with a TV news channel that GDP at current prices of last year had been revised, making the latest growth numbers look better.

"The 7.8 per cent looks impressive on the face of it, but we should get into the reality of it," Garg said. "The current-price GDP last year was ₹86 trillion. This has been revised down to ₹80 trillion... If you had not revised last year's GDP, the growth in current prices would have been only 2.6 per cent," Subhash Chandra Garg told NDTV.

Rijiju's 'drinking too much beer' jibe at Opposition

Congress' Kerala unit posted a photo on X of a beer mug with the fizz labelled as ‘official GDP’ and the drink beneath it marked as ‘Indian economy’.

Also read: Kiren Rijiju vs Congress again. But now over India's GDP: 'Drinking too much beer or blind loathing'

Reacting to the post whether the party was intoxicated due to “too much bear” or was “blind loating of India's growth” the reason behind the post.

“Is Congress Party in a state of deep intoxication due to drinking too much beer or Congressmen are so swayed by their blind loathing of India's growth that they have lost touch with the ground reality?” he wrote on X.

Commerce minister Piyush Goyal also hit out at the opposition and the former bureaucrat over criticism of the GDP figures and said, "A few jobless people call themselves economists and appear on TV channels to harm the country. Do not fall for this."