Finance Minister P Chidambaram expects the economy to grow at over 5% and perhaps closer to 5.5% in the current financial year.

Rejecting the 3.8% growth projection of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for India in the current year, Chidambaram said: "Set against the current global economic background, even a growth rate of 5% looks good but is much lower than the ambitious standards that we set for ourselves in 2004."

IMF had revised the growth projection for India from 5.6% to 3.8% - the sharpest change – as against the revised estimates for some countries like China (7.6% vs 7.8% earlier), Russia (1.5% vs 2.5% earlier) and the U.S (1.6% vs 1.7% earlier).

Chidambaram, in his address to the US-based think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also highlighted six main stories on macroeconomic fundamentals "which have given us one doubling of our GDP every decade."

Chidambaram highlighted aspects of the economy like demographics, international economic integration, capable financial system, sophisticated corporate sector, sophistication of the workforce and democracy for sustained growth.

The Finance Minister was also not above politics when he quipped: "I tell you in advance that your study will discover that India will vote my Government back to power. I thought I may caution you lest you should waste too much time and effort to figure this out."

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Jyothi Shankaran

    Jyothi’s last role was as Senior Editor with the business news channel Bloomberg TV India. He also worked as News Editor at business-standard.com, the online version of the business newspaper Business Standard. Jyothi is a chemical engineer from the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar.