India's economy to grow 5.5 per cent this fiscal year: Rangarajan

Prime Minister's Economic Advisor C Rangarajan said on Tuesday that India's economy is likely to grow at 5.5 per cent this fiscal year (FY14).

"I do expect the growth rate of Indian economy picking up in the current year. I expect the growth rate to be around five to 5.5 five per cent," Mr Rangarajan said at an event.

Delivering the 11th Justice S Rangarajan memorial lecture, he said, "This year we will be better than last year as agriculture growth will be higher than last year on good monsoon."

"Agriculture growth should be 4-5 percent in the current fiscal," he added.

On reasons for his optimism on economic growth, he said that in the last six months government had taken growth-friendly measures the impact of which would be felt during the year.

"In the last 2-3 weeks, there has been hurried activity in Parliament and quite a number of legislations have been passed, including some very important ones that were stagnated have now been passed," he added.

The PMEAC Chairman said special emphasis was being given on production and capacity-creation in some key infrastructure sector that lies in the public domain. Also, efforts are being put to remove the bottleneck in completion of projects.

Stressing the need to speed up completion of projects to ensure less intervention in the growth path, he said, "There are other challenges in the form of land acquisition for projects and environmental concerns that need to be addressed."

Mr Rangarajan also pointed out three major macroeconomic concerns for India that include taming inflation, controlling current account deficit and fiscal consolidation.

In the Economic Survey earlier this year, the government had projected the country's economic growth to be 6.1-6.7 per cent in fiscal year 2013-14. During the April-June quarter, however, GDP growth fell to four-year low of 4.4 per cent, compared to 5.4 per cent in the year-ago period.