Better Farm Growth Can Help Achieve 9 Pc GDP Rise

Buoyed by a good agriculture performance, compared to industry and services, and mixed corporate results for the first half of this fiscal, industry body CII Nov 12, said the country can get 9 per cent growth. Given the robustness of the economy and better performance of agriculture vis-a-vis industry and services, they do not hope a major deviation in our earlier forecast of GDP growth at 9.2 per cent for the year 2007-08. However, continuation of tighter monetary policy in the light of higher inflationary expectations due to global oil price hike and slowing down of the US economy are current downside risks to high GDP growth, it added.

The output of rice and oilseeds are expected to go up in the current fiscal. On corporate performance, it noted that the net sales growth has come down to 16.2 per cent during H1 of 2007-08 from 29.6 per cent during the corresponding period of 2006-07 due to the poor performances by manufacturing and services. The growth of profit after tax has also fell to 30.2 per cent for H1 of the current financial year from 42.0 per cent in the same period of last fiscal because of the slowdown in manufacturing sector at 25.3 per cent.