World Bank says India beat France to become sixth largest economy: Report

Updated World Bank figures for 2017 show that India is now the world's sixth-biggest economy, having muscled past France, which was pushed to the seventh spot, news agency AFP reported on Wednesday. India's gross domestic product (GDP) stood at $2.597 trillion at the end of 2017, compared to $2.582 trillion for France. 

The US continued to be the world's biggest economy, followed by China, Japan and Germany. Britain remained the world's fifth-biggest economy with a GDP of $2.622 trillion at the end of 2017.

Backed by government spending and investment, India's economy grew at a seven-quarter high of 7.7 per cent in the January-March quarter of the financial year 2018. But this did not prevent GDP growth, at 6.7 per cent in 2017-18, from falling to its lowest rate in four years of the Narendra Modi government.  

The finance ministry said India's economy would clock 7.5 per cent growth in 2018-19, the upper range of growth projected by the Economic Survey. 

India is expected to grow at 7.4 per cent in 2018 and 7.8 per cent in 2019, leaving its nearest rival China behind respectively at 6.6 and 6.4 per cent in the two years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in April this year. 

Last year in December, the World Economic League Table (WELT) 2018 released by the Centre for Economics and Business Research forecast that India would "leapfrog" Britain and France to become the world's fifth largest economy in 2018, ahead of an oncoming major global economic shift towards Asia.