Citing the recent cut in the growth forecast for India for fiscal year 2022-2023 by International Monetary Fund (IMF), Senior BJP leader and MP Subramanian Swamy on Thursday hit back at the central government and its overly ambitious GDP forecasts.
Taking to Twitter, Swamy said, “If the IMF which MoF (Ministry of Finance) was quoting gleefully a month ago about the 8.5% growth rate coming financial year, has now sharply cut it down to 7.4 % and soon to 6% then is the India shining or will be whining?”
To be sure, the IMF, in its latest report, slashed India’s growth rate by 0.8 percentage point to 7.4 per cent for fiscal year 2022, reflecting ”mainly less favourable external conditions and more rapid policy tightening.”
The IMF, in its World Economic Outlook update July 2022, released Tuesday, had said that the global economy, which is still reeling from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is facing an increasingly gloomy and uncertain outlook.
Furthermore, the multilateral lender also projected the global economy to slow further to 3.2 per cent in 2022 from last year’s 6.1 per cent. Global growth at 3.2 per cent in 2022 and moderating to 2.9 per cent in 2023 is lower than projected in the April 2022 World Economic Outlook by 0.4 and 0.7 percentage point, respectively.
In April, the IMF had projected a “fairly robust” growth of 8.2 per cent for India in 2022, that would have made it the fastest-growing major economy in the world, almost twice as faster than China’s 4.4 per cent.