Chidambaram on India’s GDP growth in Jan-March quarter: ‘most striking graph…’ | Latest News India

Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram expressed concern over “no sign of promised” recovery after the National Statistical Officer (NSO) provisional estimates put India’s GDP growth for the last quarter of the financial year 2021-22 at 4.1%, 0.7 percentage points lower than the February projections. The former Union minister said that the “most striking graph” of the NSO estimates is the quarterly growth rate of the last financial year, which shows a downward trend.

Chidambaram said the quarterly figures show that the growth rate is “weakening every quarter” with “no sign of the promised ‘recovery’.”

“The NSO figures are out: the most striking graph is the quarterly growth rates in 2021-22 of 20.1, 8.4, 5.4 and 4.1 per cent,” the Congress leader wrote on Twitter.

“That graph tells all. The growth rate is weakening with every quarter and there is no sign of the promised ‘recovery’,” he added.

In another tweet, Chidambaram noted that India’s economic growth in 2021-22 was “barely above the level achieved in” 2019-20.

“That means that after…two years, India’s Economy is at about the same level as it was on 31-3-2020,” he tweeted.

According to NSO’s provisional estimates, the Indian economy is expected to have grown at 8.7% during the last fiscal year, the fastest annual growth rate by a major economy. GDP growth for the four quarters that ended March 2022 were 20.1%, 8.4%, 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively. The corresponding numbers for 2020-21 were minus 23.8%, minus 6.6%, 0.7% and 2.5%.

While GDP levels in 2021-22 have crossed pre-pandemic levels, an HT analysis suggests that incomes and purchasing power for much of the population might still be lagging. Both per capita GDP and per capita private final consumption expenditure for 2021-22 continued to be lower than 2019-20 levels in real terms.