Finance Minister Jaswant Singh has said the country's economy is poised for rapid, broad-based expansion and a second revolution in agricultural productivity.

"My belief is that India stands on the edge of explosive economic growth," Singh said in an interview to the London-based economic daily Financial Times.

He said a second green revolution needed to be ushered in apart from giving renewed thrust to divestment, labour and fiscal reforms.

"We need second green revolution ...there are three areas of priority; to improve value addition, to increase food processing and to bring rural wastelands into productivity," Singh said.

Other priorities included reducing fiscal deficit and debt burden of state governments, Singh said, listing changes to restrictive labour laws and a continuation of privatisation programme as other potential areas of reforms.

Declining to go into the specifics of the reform measures in the pipeline, Singh said fiscal consolidation was crucial for the country to move on to higher growth path of over seven per cent.

The combined fiscal deficit of central and state governments was almost 11 per cent of the GDP, Singh said.

Singh was candid in saying that there were difficulties in implementing reforms particularly because of the mindset of bureaucracy which suffered from the "culture of conservatism."

"There is a big gap between policy and implementations. Unless I say these things (publicly) it will never change," he said.