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Indian economy needs to be opened up to realize 10% growth: Panagariya
Feb-27-2020

Former NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Arvind Panagariya has said that India's economic slowdown has appeared to have bottomed out and now country’s economy needs to be opened up if it wants to realize the ambition of a 10 percent growth rate. He said India's GDP growth is expected to be 6 percent in the next fiscal year (FY21) and then it will get back to 7-8 percent which has been the case in the last 15-16 year period. He added 'in the second half of the current fiscal year, which would be ending on March 31, we should see some bit of recovery, not a big one but certainly the second half (of the fiscal year) should look better than the first half.'

Panagariya noted that since about 2003, India has been growing at an average rate of about 7 percent and the first five years of the Modi government was characterised by 7.5 percent growth on an average. Emphasising that the Indian economy can do a lot better no doubt, he said that the main factor which led to the slowdown has to do with the financial markets and that translated into weakening of the balance sheets of both the banks as well as the corporates.

Chairman further said that if a country with a 500 million-people strong labour force cannot compete in the labour intensive products, it points to the fact that something is fundamentally wrong with the way some of the degradation in the system is. So, he said ‘one has to go to the root cause what is causing it and remove those obstacles, hurdles and not try to give them some advantage by putting in tariffs. That only is encouraging inefficiency and small plants’. He also pointed out that one of India's big problems is that there is too much pre-occupation with small and micro and small enterprises.

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