Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that India remains among the fastest growing economies of the world and efforts are being made to make it grow faster.
Speaking to the reporters, she said International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected a reduced growth rate for India, but the country’s economy is still growing as the fastest.
On Tuesday, the IMF slashed India’s growth projection to 6.1 percent for the current fiscal from its July forecast of 7 percent.
The finance minister is in Washington to attend the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund or IMF and the World Bank.
Sitharaman said she is certainly not risking a comparison with China, even though the two countries growth rates have been projected at 6.1 per cent in a latest IMF report.
She said the IMF in its latest projections reduced the growth rate for all the global economies. It reduced the growth for India too. However, even with that India is still growing as the fastest growing economy.
As against India’s real growth rate of 6.8 per cent in 2018, the IMF in its latest World Economic Outlook released on Tuesday, projected the country’s growth rate at 6.1 per cent for 2019 and noted that the Indian economy is expected to pick up at 7 per cent in 2020.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Thursday said though India has worked on the fundamentals of its economy, there are problems, including the long-term drivers of growth, that need to be addressed.
“India has worked on the fundamentals (of its economy), but there are problems to be addressed. In the financial sector, especially non-banking institutions, there are steps taken now to consolidate banks. They ought to help resolve some of these issues,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters at a news conference 2019, Annual meetings in Washington D.C..
