With growth rate of 8.2%, India remains world’s fastest-growing economy
The GDP figures for the whole year have been much better than the estimates of the RBI and the World Bank. The RBI’s estimate for GDP for the financial year 2024 was 7%, and the World Bank’s estimate was 6.6 percent.
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that 8.2 percent GDP growth in the financial year 2023-24 is excellent and the pace of growth will continue in the third term of the Modi government. She said that the construction sector has grown significantly by 9.9%. This progress reflects the success of the efforts of the Modi government.
Chairman of the Sixteenth Finance Commission Arvind Panagariya said that the GDP growth rate of 8.2 percent is good news for India. According to Anand Rathi Shares Chief Economist Sujan Hazra, India has achieved this feat on the back of strong growth in consumption.
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India surpassed all developed countries
According to the Reserve Bank, provisional GDP growth in FY 2023-24 has increased to 7.6% from 7.0% last year. This is the third consecutive year when the growth rate is 7.02 percent or more. RBI has said in the annual report that the Indian economy is expected to grow at the rate of 7.02% in the current financial year 2024-2025.
India has maintained this pace at a time when many countries of the world are struggling with economic and geopolitical crisis. China’s economic growth rate was only 5.3 percent in the January-March quarter. The IMF estimates that India will perform better than the US, Japan, UK, France, Germany, and China. Leading rating agency Moody’s said that strong economic growth and policy continuity is expected after the elections. Moody’s has projected India’s growth rate to be 6.8 percent in 2024 and 6.5 percent in 2025.
The government’s fiscal deficit was 5.63% of GDP in the last year, which is slightly less than the estimate of 5.8%. The fiscal deficit i.e. the difference between expenditure and revenue has been Rs 16.53 lakh crore.
India brought back its gold after 33 years
India has transferred 100 tonnes of its gold kept in Britain to domestic vaults in the financial year 2023-2024. This is the largest transfer of gold since 1991. In the year 1991, a large part of the gold was taken out of the vaults to be pledged to deal with the foreign exchange crisis. In the financial year 2023–24, the country’s total gold reserves increased by 27.46 tonnes and increased to 822 tonnes.
In 1991, the Chandrashekhar government of Congress mortgaged gold to deal with the balance of payments crisis. Between July 4 and July 18 of that year, the RBI had mortgaged 46.91 metric tons of gold with the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan to raise $400 million. With the arrival of gold, the amount of gold stored locally has increased to more than 408 metric tons. This means that local and foreign holdings are now almost equal.
Stock market made a strong comeback
The trend of decline in the local stock markets for the last five sessions came to a halt on Friday. Amidst volatile trading, the Sensex closed at 73,961.31, up 75.71 points. During trading, it has also been at the upper level of 74,478.98 points and the lower level of 73,765.15 points. In this way, a lot of volatility has been seen in the index. Nifty closed at 22,530.70 points, up 42.05 points.
The growth rate of eight major basic industries reached 6.2% in April. Information has been given in the official data released on Friday. According to official data, the growth rate of basic industries has been very good due to better production of natural gas, refinery products, and electricity in the month of April.
India made more records in progress
The growth rate of these eight industries has been 6% since March, whereas a year ago, in April 2023, this growth rate was 4.6 percent. Coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilizers, steel, cement, and electricity are among the core industries. Together, they have a 40.27 percent share of the country’s Index of Industrial Production (IIP).
