President Pranab Mukherjee has sought to counter criticism against the economic stimulus provided when he was the Finance Minister in 2009 and maintained that economy under him registered high growth rates.
Seeking to debunk criticism that the stimulus was responsible for high fiscal deficit and depreciation of rupee, he told Euronews, “...like most other countries we provided stimulus package to ensure that fastest sliding down of the GDP growth leading to unemployment could be arrested...
“In India we got temporary relief because in the year, from 9 per cent GDP growth we had registered a 6.7 per cent (2007-08).”
But, Mukherjee said, in the remaining two years, India registered high growth of 8.7 per cent (2009-2010) and 9.3 per cent (2010-11). But again from the third year it started sliding down.
India’s economic growth rate slipped to 6.2 per cent in 2011-12 and to a decade’s low of 5 per cent a year after. In the first quarter of the current financial year it was 4.4 per cent. According to Asian Development Bank’s latest projection the growth rate could fall to 4.7 per cent in 2013-14.