Pranab: Our objective is to recover pre-crisis growth momentum

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today assured the global financial community of reverting the Indian economy to a recovery path by creating conditions to revive private investment.

“For the current financial year, our objective is to focus on recovering our the pre-crisis growth momentum, create conditions for the rapid revival of high growth in private investment and address supply bottlenecks in agriculture, energy and transport sectors,” he said at the Asian Development Bank governor’s business session here. He said despite the adverse international environment, India had managed to maintain a growth rate of about seven per cent in the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011-12. “I am confident the strong fundamentals of our economy will help us return to a sustained growth path of eight to 10 per cent a year in the coming years,” he added.

He exuded confidence about the rapid revival of growth in private investment at a time when the government was facing charges of paralysis in policy making and criticism over the proposed changes to tax laws with retrospective effect to bring deals like the Vodafone-Hutchison one under the tax net. He added India’s banking was still robust and the regulatory and financial sector environments had stood the test of time.

Promising “huge scope” for foreign investments, Mukherjee said India needed about $1 trillion in the next five years for infrastructure development, half of which had to come from the private sector.

He also mentioned the various steps taken to achieve fiscal consolidation, to adopt domestic demand-driven strategy to minimise the impact of international crises, to ease extra commercial borrowings, along with steps taken in the fields of direct and indirect taxes.