Rate cut for sure: Now or in August?

The RBI would do well to frontload rate cut as growth is faltering and inflation well within target

Last Friday, hours after India got its newest Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, a ministry of statistics and programme implementation release revealed that India is no longer the world’s fastest growing large economy. The economic growth in the last quarter of 2019, ending March, dropped to 5.8 per cent, the lowest in the past 20 quarters. This also pulled down the annual growth in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 6.8 per cent, the slowest in the Modi 1.0 regime. 

To add to the woes, the first periodic labour force survey of the government, released on the same day, showed the