Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pegs India's GDP growth at over 8% in 2015-16 while rest of the world, including Reserve Bank of India seems to disagree.
"India's outlook for growth is improving gradually," said Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan on April 7 while announcing this year's first bi-monthly monetary policy.
During the course of the policy statement, Rajan not only sweetly reprimanded the Centre for minimum support price for farmers, he also punctured a few holes in Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's claim that India will grow at 8.1-8.5% of GDP in this new fiscal. On inflation, Rajan said that there are upside risks and cited "larger than anticipated administered price revisions" as one of the seven causes or probabilities.
But the bigger shock for Modi government is Reserve Bank's GDP projections.
Rajan said, "GDP growth estimates of the CSO for 2014-15 already project a robust pick-up, but leading and coincident indicators suggest a downward revision of these estimates when fuller information on real activity for the last quarter becomes available."
RBI's best case scenario for India's GDP for 2015-16 is 7.8%, up 30 basis points from 2014-15. However, this best case projection comes with a downward bias "to reflect the still subdued indicators of economic activity."
This brings us to what the world is saying about how quick India will grow in the current fiscal.
IMF
International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose chief Christine Lagarde was in India last month and termed India as a 'bright spot' in world economy, has predicted that India's GDP for 2015-16 will be 7.5%, below RBI's projection as well as much lower than Jaitley's minimum 8.1% prediction.
Also Read: IMF raises India growth forecast to 7.2% for current fiscal
World Bank
The World Bank has put India's growth projection in 2015-16 at 6.4%. However, they are yet to revise their numbers as this projection was made in January and it was only in February that India's Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) revised its method of calculating GDP. However, even with a revision, World Bank's new projection is likely to be under 8%.
Also Read: World Bank says India GDP likely to grow by 6.4% in 2015
S&P
Ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) seems the most upbeat among its global peers when it comes to projecting India's growth rate. The agency first termed India as a 'bright spot' a term then used by IMF's Lagarde as well.
S&P sharply revised India's growth figures to 7.9% for 2015-16 as against its earlier estimate of 6.2%.
Also Read: S&P now says India 'bright spot', ups GDP forecast
India's RBI has said that India is likely to grow at a maximum of 7.8% and it added, "Uncertainty surrounding the arrival and distribution of the monsoon and unanticipated global developments are the two major risks to baseline growth projections."
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