India’s economy grew 13.5 per cent in the April-June quarter from a year ago, its fastest annual expansion in a year.
Gross domestic product (GDP) in the three months to June 30 was 13.5 per cent higher than a year earlier, compared to 4.1 per cent in the January to March quarter.
The last time GDP hit a higher annual growth was in April-June 2021 when it was 20.1 per cent higher than the pandemic-depressed level of a year before.
China’s economy grew 0.4 per cent in the April-June quarter.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stated earlier this month that the GDP growth rate would probably be around 16.2 per cent in the first quarter (April-June) of this fiscal year.
A Reuters poll of economists had predicted the economy would grow 15.2 per cent year-on-year in the April-June quarter. Many prominent analysts had also projected that the Indian economy would expand at a double-digit growth rate due to the base effect.
PTI reported that rating agency ICRA had predicted that the GDP was likely to grow at 13 per cent, while the State Bank of India, in its report, projected the growth rate at 15.7 per cent for April-June 2022.
Economists said that forward-looking data show that Asia’s third-largest economy is coping well despite deteriorating global economic conditions.
“More timely data suggest that resilience has continued in Q3 (July-September) too,” Shilan Shah, India economist at Capital Economics, Singapore, told Reuters and added that the economy had better resisted the impact of the Omicron wave in January-March than it had coped with the previous wave of the pandemic.
Other data releases for India on Wednesday showed the core sector output, or the infrastructure factories output, expanded 4.5 per cent year-on-year in July.
The production growth of eight infrastructure sectors — coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertiliser, steel, cement and electricity — was 11.5 per cent in April-July this fiscal against 21.4 per cent a year ago.
