Pittsburgh: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday predicted a 6.3 percent growth for India during the current fiscal even though he saw a dip in the economic expansion of developing countries as a whole to 1.5 percent.
"Despite a drought, which will affect agricultural production, we expect to grow by around 6.3 percent in 2009-10," the Prime Minister told the plenary session of the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh.
He also said the economy will stage a recovery the next year to 7-7.5 percent.
"The relatively strong performance is partly due to the strong stimulus measures introduced in the second half of 2008-09 that have been continued in the current financial year."
The Prime Minister maintained that the current global financial crisis had affected developing countries as well.
"The fact that some of us have fared relatively well does not mean the crisis has not affected the developing world significantly," he said, adding the drop in the growth of developing countries indicated the extent of such impact.
"An estimated 90 million people in the developing world are likely to be pushed below the poverty line."
The Prime Minister said the current global financial crisis required tackling the problems at the root to restore normalcy in the global economy.
"This requires a commitment that we will not undertake any premature withdrawal of stimulus. We must certainly plan for an orderly exit when the time is right. But that time is not now," he said.
India has announced three stimulus packages since December last year, apart from announcing heavy doses towards public expenditure in the $204 billion national budget presented in July.
Singh, at whose instance India decided to pump in $10 billion into the International Monetary Fund (IMF), also made a strong pitch for doubling the capital base of the World Bank as it was necessary in the light of $100 billion it proposed to lend over the next three years.
"If the capital base of the World Bank is not expanded, it will have to compress lending at the end of the three-year period to less than the pre-crisis level," he said.
"This is surely not acceptable."
Singh arrived in Pittsburgh on Thursday for the third Summit of G20, after the previous ones in London in April and in Washington in November last year.
Besides India and the US, the Group of 20 comprises Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Britain and the EU.
This forum has now virtually eclipsed the G8--the once elite club of rich nations--as the forum that will shape future global economic policy to reflect the growing economic clout of emerging economies like India, China and Brazil.
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