India to clock pre-crisis growth next fiscal: Manmohan

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the G20 Summit in Seoul on Friday. Singh told the Summit that India will revert to its pre-crisis economic growth rate of 9 per cent in the next fiscal.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday told the global leaders that India will revert to its pre-crisis economic growth rate of 9 per cent in the next fiscal.

“I am happy to say that the Indian economy has rebounded fairly well from the crisis... We hope to achieve 9 per cent (growth) in 2011-12,” he said while speaking at the Plenary Session of the G20 Summit in Seoul.

As regards the current fiscal, Dr. Singh said the country was likely to clock 8.5 per cent growth rate, up from 7.4 per cent in 2009-10.

India was growing at 9 per cent before the financial meltdown in 2008 hit the world economies and slowed growth.

“We grew at 9 per cent in the four years prior to the crisis, but slowed down to 6.7 per cent in the 2008-09,” Dr. Singh said, adding the emerging economies in Asia are now doing well.

“Emerging market countries have done well on the whole, and especially so in Asia,” he told an audience which included U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

G20, a grouping of industrialised and emerging economies, has been at the forefront of efforts to combat the impact of the global financial meltdown triggered by fall of the iconic American investment banker Lehman Brothers in September 2008.