The government has just begun its own assessment of India’s growth prospects for this year that would be shared in due course of time, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday evening.
The Minister also said that the government’s new policy for public sector enterprises, which will notify strategic sectors where at least one public unit needs to operate, is being finalised and will be put up for the Union Cabinet’s approval soon.
“We have only now started doing some kind of an assessment,” the Minister said. “We waited for the commencement of the second half of the year, which has just started. We have got a lot of inputs that are fairly different from what we had got in July, as ideally it should be,” she said, adding that a statement would be made in public or in Parliament once the exercise is complete.
She was responding to a query on whether India will come up with its own official estimates as part of a mid-year review, following estimates from the RBI and the International Monetary Fund that expect the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to contract by 9.5% and 10.4% in 2020-21, respectively.
She was speaking at the unveiling of the Fifteenth Finance Commission chairperson N.K. Singh’s autobiography Portraits of Power in the capital.
