Economic Survey: Chasing Wealth Creation, Defending Data

In July 2019, India’s chief economic adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian released his first Economic Survey, a document that predicted 7% GDP growth for the country in FY’20 and called for ‘blue-sky’ thinking.

The idea was that if the government and the country’s citizens adopted an uninhibited approach to problem-solving, everyone could achieve their goals.

A year later, and India has stumbled on its journey to becoming a $5 trillion economy. GDP growth did not turn out at 7% as Subramanian’s team had predicted. It instead is set to clock in at a much lower 5%, on the back of falling consumption and muted private investment.

Economic Survey 2020 acknowledges this, with Subramanian noting in a press conference on Friday afternoon that the slump has bottomed out. More importantly though, the document and believes the slump has bottomed out but places India’s slowdown in two contexts.

The document situates the events of last year within the global economy’s slowdown – “world output growth estimated to grow at its slowest pace of 2.9% since the global financial crisis” – and in the framework of India’s financial sector “acting as a drag on the real sector”.