Newly-appointed Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran on Tuesday said that India will become a $5 trillion dollar economy by the financial year of 2025-’26 or 2026-’27, PTI reported.
Nageswaran’s projection pushes back the government’s earlier announced time frame to achieve the target by two years. In 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the government was working towards making India a $5 trillion dollar economy by the financial year of 2024-’25.
At a post-Budget press conference on Tuesday, the chief economic adviser said that India’s Gross Domestic Product has already crossed $3trillion.
“Depending on how exchange rate move...Indian Rupee would remain stable to strong given what is going on the developed world,” Nageswaran said at a press conference. “If we continue to retain the path of 8%-9% real GDP, it would translate into 8% dollar GDP growth. If we extrapolate that we should be at the $5 trillion by 2025-26 or 2026-27.”
On Monday, the Economic Survey had projected that India’s GDP will grow by 8% to 8.5% in the next fiscal year of 2022-’23. It pegged GDP growth in the current fiscal year (2021-’22) at 9.2%. This is in line with the first advanced estimate released by the government’s National Statistical Office earlier this month.
The document said that economic activity has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. “Almost all indicators show that the economic impact of the ‘second wave’ in Q1 was much smaller than that experienced during the full lockdown phase in 2020-’21, even though the health impact was more severe,” it added.
India’s economy had contracted by 7.3% in the financial year 2020-21 after the country was hit by a nationwide lockdown in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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