New Delhi: Ahead of budget, the government pegged an economic forecast of India's economic growth. The Union Minister for Finance & Corporate Affairs Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the Economic Survey 2022-23 in the Parliament today.
According to the economic survey, depending on the direction of global economic and political developments, India's GDP will expand by 6.0% to 6.8% in 2023–2024.
The prognosis is broadly comparable to the projections made by locally and by multilateral organisations like the RBI and the World Bank, IMF, and ADB.
The optimistic growth forecasts stem from a number of positives like the rebound of private consumption given a boost to production activity, higher Capital Expenditure (Capex), near-universal vaccination coverage enabling people to spend on contact-based services, such as restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, and cinemas, as well as the return of migrant workers to cities to work in construction sites leading to a significant decline in housing market inventory, the strengthening of the balance sheets of the Corporates, a well-capitalised public sector banks ready to increase the credit supply and the credit growth to the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector to name the major ones.
As per reports, growth is expected to be brisk in FY24 as a vigorous credit disbursal, and capital investment cycle is expected to unfold in India with the strengthening of the balance sheets of the corporate and banking sectors. Further support to economic growth will come from the expansion of public digital platforms and path-breaking measures such as PM GatiShakti, the National Logistics Policy, and the Production-Linked Incentive schemes to boost manufacturing output.
The Survey says, the economy is expected to grow at 7 per cent for the year ending March 2023. This follows an 8.7 per cent growth in the previous financial year.
Despite the three shocks of COVID-19, Russian-Ukraine conflict and the Central Banks across economies led by Federal Reserve responding with synchronised policy rate hikes to curb inflation, leading to appreciation of US Dollar and the widening of the Current Account Deficits (CAD) in net importing economies, agencies worldwide continue to project India as the fastest-growing major economy at 6.5-7.0 per cent in FY23.
According to Survey, India’s economic growth in FY23 has been principally led by private consumption and capital formation and they have helped generate employment. Moreover, World’s second-largest vaccination drive involving more than 2 billion doses also served to lift consumer sentiments that may prolong the rebound in consumption.
The Survey says, the credit growth to the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector has been remarkably high, over 30.6 per cent, on average during Jan-Nov 2022.
Apart from this, increase in the overall bank credit has also been influenced by the shift in borrower’s funding choices from volatile bond markets.
The Capital Expenditure (Capex) of the central government, which increased by 63.4 per cent in the first eight months of FY23, was another growth driver of the Indian economy in the current year, crowding in the private Capex since the January-March quarter of 2022.
It also says that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been directly providing jobs in rural areas and indirectly creating opportunities for rural households to diversify their sources of income generation. Schemes like PM-Kisan and PM Garib Kalyan Yojana have helped in ensuring food security in the country. The results of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) also show improvement in rural welfare indicators from FY16 to FY20, covering aspects like gender, fertility rate, household amenities, and women empowerment.
The Survey notes with optimism that Indian economy appears to have moved on after its encounter with the pandemic, staging a full recovery in FY22 ahead of many nations.
The global growth has also been projected to decline in 2023 and is expected to remain generally subdued in the following years as well. The slowing demand will likely push down global commodity prices and improve India’s CAD in FY24.
The Survey points out that factors like monetary tightening by the RBI, the widening of the CAD, and the plateauing growth of exports have essentially been the outcome of geopolitical strife in Europe. As these developments posed downside risks to the growth of the Indian economy in FY23, many agencies worldwide have been revising their growth forecast of the Indian economy downwards. These forecasts, including the advance estimates released by the NSO, now broadly lie in the range of 6.5-7.0 per cent.
Despite the downward revision, the growth estimate for FY23 is higher than for almost all major economies and even slightly above the average growth of the Indian economy in the decade leading up to the pandemic.
IMF estimates India to be one of the top two fast-growing significant economies in 2022.
The growth of exports may have moderated in the second half of FY23. However, their surge in FY22 and the first half of FY23 induced a shift in the gears of the production processes from mild acceleration to cruise mode.
Manufacturing and investment activities consequently gained traction. By the time the growth of exports moderated, the rebound in domestic consumption had sufficiently matured to take forward the growth of India’s economy. Private Consumption as a percentage of GDP stood at 58.4 per cent in Q2 of FY23, the highest among the second quarters of all the years since 2013-14, supported by a rebound in contact-intensive services such as trade, hotel and transport, which registered sequential growth of 16 per cent in real terms in Q2 of FY23 compared to the previous quarter.
Domestic private consumption remains buoyant in November 2022.
While an increase in export demand, rebound in consumption, and public capex have contributed to a recovery in the investment/manufacturing activities of the corporates. The banking sector in India has also responded in equal measure to the demand for credit as the Year-on-Year growth in credit since the January-March quarter of 2022 has moved into double-digits and is rising across most sectors.
RBI has projected headline inflation at 6.8 per cent in FY23, which is outside its target range. At the same time, it is not high enough to deter private consumption and also not so low as to weaken the inducement to invest.
Global commodity prices may have eased but are still higher compared to pre-conflict levels and they have further widened the CAD, already enlarged by India's growth momentum. For FY23, India has sufficient forex reserves to finance the CAD and intervene in the forex market to manage volatility in the Indian rupee.
Dwelling on the Outlook for 2023-24, the Survey says, India’s recovery from the pandemic was relatively quick, and growth in the upcoming year will be supported by solid domestic demand and a pickup in capital investment.
Budgeted capital expenditure rose 2.7 times in the last seven years, from FY16 to FY23, the survey added.
Global growth is forecasted to slow from 3.2 per cent in 2022 to 2.7 per cent in 2023 as per IMF’s World Economic Outlook, October 2022.
The Survey emphasises that growth is inclusive when it creates jobs. Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows that the urban unemployment rate for people aged 15 years and above declined from 9.8 per cent in the quarter ending September 2021 to 7.2 per cent one year later (quarter ending September 2022).
In FY21, the Government announced the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme, which succeeded in shielding micro, small and medium enterprises from financial distress. Among these micro units, more than half had an overall exposure of less than Rs10 lakh.
India is the third-largest economy in the world in PPP terms and the fifth-largest in market exchange rates. As expected of a nation of this size, the Indian economy in FY23 has nearly “recouped” what was lost, “renewed” what had paused, and “re-energised” what had slowed during the pandemic and since the conflict in Europe.
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