‘India projected to clock 7.5% growth in the current fiscal’

NEW YORK: India is likely to clock a 7.5 per cent economic growth in the current fiscal, NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Arvind Panagariya has said, even as he acknowledged that creation of “good jobs” in the country remains a big challenge.

“For the current fiscal year of 2017-18, I expect that we will be back to at least 7.5 per cent and as you get towards the last quarter of the year probably we will begin to touch eight per cent. But the average for the year would be about 7.5 per cent,” Panagariya told PTI in an interview here.

Panagariya, who had presented India’s ‘Voluntary National Review Report on Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals’ at the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development 2017 last week, however, said that job creation in the country, especially at the lower, semiskilled level, “truly is the biggest challenge, probably bigger than growing at eight per cent.”

He said it is unfortunate that India’s better performing sectors such as automobile, auto parts, engineering goods, petroleum refinery, pharmaceuticals and IT enabled services, are not very employment-intensive.

“All these (sectors) are either very capital intensive or skill la- bour intensive. There is a big need for good jobs at the lower, semiskilled level. There we have got a big challenge,” he said.

Panagariya said he does not agree with the classification in some sections of the media that India’s economic growth is a jobless growth. “I personally don’t believe that is true. We cannot be growing at 7.5 per cent and then you say that jobs are not growing, investments are not growing at a satisfactory pace.

All of that growth could not have come from productivity alone,” he said.