By IANS,
Bhubaneswar : Holding that the current economic slowdown would be in the “short term”, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia Friday said India could be the world’s third largest economy in next 20 years as economic power seemed to be shifting from from industrialised countries to developing countries.
“Don’t get too worried about the short term slowdown that the newspapers keep talking about,” Ahluwalia said, in his address at the 7th annual convocation ceremony of the KIIT University here.
“There are very important global changes taking place right now with the shift of economic power from the industrialized countries from one hand to developing countries largely Asia,” he said.
“We are not lagging behind everybody. We are just coming in second to China and people are looking at India. This is going to be some thing that will reach maturity,” Ahluwalia said.
“There are many predictions that, say by the year 2030-2033, the largest GDP in the world will be China, second largest would be United States and third largest will be India,” he said.
Delivering another lecture at the state-run National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO) on its 11th foundation day, Ahluwalia said this year the economy has been slightly slow but added it was not only for India, but for other countries also.
“Around the world this is not a normal year. Therefore the current Indian economy must be viewed in that context,” he said.
“When we approached to the 12th (Five-Year) Plan a few months ago, we had targeted about nine percent growth. I would say that nothing that we have seen right now suggest that nine percent is not feasible,” he said.