Pranab Mukherjee confident India's growth rate will bounce back

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday sought to allay concerns over a slowdown in India's economic growth rate, exuding confidence that the Indian economy would ride on its strong fundamentals and resilence to take a higher growth trajectory.

Mukherjee pointed out that even though the latest figures reflect that India's growth rate has come down, the country still remains the second fastest growing economy in the G-20, next only to China.

"In 2008-09 our GDP came down to 6.9% but very quickly we recovered in next two years and it was 8.4%. Again it has come down to 6.9%, but the resilience, basic fundamentals of Indian economy, which everybody recognise; high rate of savings, substantial investment coming from the domestic savings itself.

"Therefore these two basic fundamentals and resilience of the economy clearly demonstrates that Indian economy will grow at a faster pace. Moreover there is important factor, a huge market, growing purchasing power, growing middle class, the domestic demand driven factors to provide the stimulus to the growth elements in Indian economy is very strong. Therefore I do feel Indian economy would grow faster," Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee was addressing a press conference at the end of his Washington visit to attend the annual Spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Referring to his meetings here, Mukherjee said they shared their perception on the recovery of the world economy.

"The US economy is recovering. There are some signs of recovery of Europe, but there has been some downward projection of emerging market economies. But it is expected that 2012 would be comparatively better," the Finance Minister said in his opening remarks.

Major consideration this time ?" both in G-20 and IMF --was how to mobilise the resources to enhance the fire power of the IMF to intervene in the crisis situation, he said, adding it has been agreed that this would be $430 billion.