India aims to accelerate economic growth to nine per cent, despite deepening global financial worries and stubborn domestic inflationary pressures, Prime minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday.
The higher growth target comes even though India's hawkish central bank, which has hiked interest rates 11 times in 18 months, says slower expansion may be required to rein in close to double-digit inflation.
'We want to achieve a growth rate of nine per cent per annum [starting in 2012],' premier Manmohan Singh said as he outlined the Congress government's goals for India's next five-year economic plan to 2017.
Despite launching moves to free up its economy two decades ago, India still runs on five-year plans introduced in 1951 by its first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, who admired the-then Soviet Union's central economic planning model.
Singh told reporters in New Delhi he wanted to keep open 'the possibility of raising the growth rate — if the domestic and international situation improves — to 9.2 per cent.'
India's economy has grown by around 8.6 per cent a year since 2006 while neighbouring emerging market giant China's economy has expanded by nearly 10 per cent in the same period.
While the nine per cent goal may seem lofty in the face of anaemic Western growth, it represents an official climbdown from the government's dream of attaining double-digit economic growth in the next five-year plan.
Source : New Age
