NEW DELHI: India Inc expects the country’s 2017-18 economic growth to be above the 6.5 per cent-mark due to a favourable base effect. India Inc’s reactions came after the estimate of national income for 2017-18, released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), showed that implementation of GST and subsequent slowdown in the manufacturing sector was expected to drag down India’s growth to 6.5 per cent in 2017-18.
India’s projected economic growth rate for 2017-18 will be lower than the 7.1 per cent achieved in 2016-17, the data showed.
“The advance estimates for the full year have been based on limited data, which would be available for a period of 6-9 months for different sectors. Therefore, they are not fully factoring in the expected pickup in growth in the later months of FY2018, related to a favourable base effect and a ‘catch up’ following the subdued growth momentum in H1 FY2018,” said Aditi Nayar, Principal, Economist at ICRA.
“Accordingly, the advance estimates for GDP and GVA growth appear to be understating economic expansion for FY2018, in our view,” Nayar said.
The data disclosed that sectors like ‘public administration, defence and other services’, ‘Trade, hotels, transport, communication and services related to broadcasting’, ‘electricity, gas, water supply and other utility services’ and ‘financial, real estate and professional services’ registered a growth rate of over 7 per cent.
On the other hand, growth in the ‘agriculture, forestry and fishing’, ‘mining and quarrying’, ‘manufacturing’ and ‘construction’ sectors “is estimated to be 2.1 per cent (from 4.9 per cent), 2.9 per cent (from 1.8 per cent), 4.6 per cent (from 7.9 per cent) and 3.6 per cent (from 1.7 per cent)”, respectively.
The CSO used the first seven-month data of 2017-18 to extrapolate figures for the full fiscal.
“Since these estimates are based on data till November 2017, it has not captured the latest up-tick in the vehicle sales and the improvement in the steel and cement sectors; we expect the final numbers to be revised upwards as and when they happen,” said Arun Thukral, Managing Director and CEO, Axis Securities. — IANS
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