Fitch Lowers India Growth Forecast For FY20 To 6.6%

On weaker progress in the manufacturing and agricultural sector over the past year, the global agency Fitch cut India's growth projection for the FY 2019-20 to 6.6% as against the earlier estimate of 6.8%.

Further, for Fy 21 and Fy 22, the global rating agency has retained GDP at 7.1% and 7%, respectively. For the FY 2018-19, India registered the slowest growth pace in 5 years at 6.8%.

"We see growth for FY 2019-2020 printing at 6.6 per cent, before stepping up to 7.1 per cent in FY 2020-2021 and 7.0 per cent in FY 2021-2022," Fitch said.

For 4 consecutive quarters, India has been witness to slow growth and in March qtr of the calendar year 2019, the growth came in at just 5.8% in comparison to the same quarter of the previous year of a high at 8.1%.

"This is the lowest growth outturn in five years. The slowdown over the past year has been driven by steadily cooling activity in the manufacturing sector and, to a lesser extent, agriculture. Weaker momentum has been mainly domestically driven, though export growth has also faltered more recently," Fitch said.

The RBI in its recent monetary policy review meet in June cut back on the interest rate for the third straight time to 5.75%, a nine-year low level, on concerns of slowing economy as well as contained level of inflation.

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