The Growth Debate

NEW DELHI: Last week the Central Statistics Office (CSO) released the gross domestic product (GDP) data for the quarter ended December 2022 as well as the second advance estimates for 2022-23.While newspaper headlines claimed that growth had slowed in Q3, experts and government officials argued otherwise. The latter point out that growth rates for previous years have been revised upwards, creating a base effect. A case of comparing apples and oranges. An interesting subtext of this exchange of views though is that India’s post-covid economic devastation was overestimated and its subsequent recovery underestimated.It doesn’t help that other pieces of data on the Indian economy too are sending out mixed signals. All this while retail inflation is proving to be a stubborn challenge to put out. All of this begs many questions: Is the economy slowing? Is inflation poised to return? Will the private sector-led investment cycle kick-in? To answer this and more we spoke to Sajjid Chinoy, Chief Economist (India), nJ P Morgan.