By IANS
New Delhi : India’s economic growth has slipped to 8.4 percent for the third quarter of this fiscal, official figures showed Friday – the day Finance Minister P. Chidambaram presented the national budget for 2008-09 with the promise to push growth.
India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth was 9.1 percent for the same period of 2006-07 and 9.3 percent and 8.9 percent for the first two quarters of 2007-08, said the Central Statistical Organisation.
As a result of this major fall in growth, the average expansion of GDP during the first three quarters of this fiscal stands at 8.9 percent, as opposed to 9.6 percent for the like period of previous fiscal.
The dip in growth has further deepened the fears of policymakers about the impact of possible global recession on the Indian economy, which has especially hit the export sector hard.
“Since August, financial markets in developed countries have witnessed considerable turbulence that has not yet abated. The consequences for developing countries are also not yet clear,” Chidambaram said.
The official figures pointed out that while the farm sector has grown a tad faster during the first three quarters at 3.5 percent, industry’s growth has dipped sharply to 9.6 percent.
The output of the two sectors had expanded by 3.4 percent and 11.7 percent, respectively, during the corresponding three quarters of the previous fiscal.
Even the services sector, which Chidambaram described as “drivers” of growth, saw the growth decline during the current fiscal, while mining and quarrying saw the growth move up marginally.