GDP growth dips to 5-year low, government assures situation would improve in Q2
In bad news for the new government on day one, CSO data showed that India’s economy grew at a much-lower-than-expected 5.8% in the January-March period, slowest in past 17 quarters, which the government said is due to some temporary factors like NBFC sectors liquidity crunch.
By : migrator
Update: 2019-05-31 23:42 GMT
New Delhi
India’s GDP growth has now slipped to 5.8% in Q4 after growing 6.6% in the third quarter, 7% in second and 8% in the first quarter. The below 6 per cent growth of Q4 is the slowest in five years.
The March quarter growth rate is slowest since 2014-15. The previous low was 6.4 per cent in 2013-14. For fiscal year 2018-19, the growth was 6.8%. The GDP growth fell from 7.2 per cent in the previous fiscal, due to poor performance in agriculture and subdued manufacturing growth.
The GDP numbers did not augur well for the new Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman who has a big task in hand to revive the growth momentum and bring economy back on track. Unfortunately, GDP growth is expected to maintain contraction even in Q1 period of current fiscal.
As per official data, ‘Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing’ sector has shown a growth rate of 2.9 per cent as against previous year’s growth rate of 5 per cent. The ‘Mining and Quarrying’ sector has shown a growth rate of 1.3 per cent as against previous year’s 5.1 per cent.
“There was some slowdown in quarterly growth due to temporary factors. Problems in the NBFC sector reflected in the consumption slowdown,” said Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, adding the slowdown could continue in the first quarter of the current fiscal but the situation would improve in the second quarter (July-September).
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