The ratings agency took into account higher inflation, high interest rates and slowing global growth that, it believes, will dampen economic momentum more than it had expected.
Union Minister DV Sadanada Gowda on Thursday said the current economic situation in the country was “challenging†but expressed the hope that the measures taken by the union government to address it would see India quickly progress ahead ‘in a very short time.’
Former president Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday said the government’s ambitious target of becoming a USD 5-trillion economy by 2024-25 is possible through prudent fiscal management. Mukherjee also said the GST needs more clarity and that some signs of a slowdown in the economy were visible since last year, leading to a lower GDP growth rate.
The projected growth compares to the worst ever contraction of 7.3 per cent witnessed in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021 (FY21) and 4 per cent expansion in 2019-20.
January 18, 2021
“The pandemic has reinforced some of the most latent inequalities in India, both socially and economically,” says Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And to map this inequality, she says, one need only look at who has gained.
In 2020, the cumulative wealth of 828 Indians on the Hurun India Rich List stood at $821 billion (Rs60.15 lakh crore), up by $140 billion from a year ago. A large part of this increase was thanks to one man and one company Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries (RIL).
Ambani’s RIL raised $26.4 billion in deals with Facebook, Google, and several other investors, during the peak of the pandemic-related lockdowns. These deals happened in a climate of economic turbulence in India, which reported a 23.9% degrowth in the quarter ending June 2020, the first GDP decline in four decades.