"I do expect the growth rate of Indian economy picking up in the current year. I expect the growth rate to be around five to 5.5 five percent," Rangarajan said.
Delivering the 11th Justice S Rangarajan memorial lecture, he said, "This year we will be better than last year as agriculture growth will be higher than last year on good monsoon."
"Agriculture growth should be 4-5 percent in the current fiscal," he added.
On reasons for his optimism on economic growth, Rangarajan said that in the last six months government had taken growth-friendly measures the impact of which would be felt in the course of the year.
"In the last 2-3 weeks, there has been hurried activity in Parliament and quite a number of legislations have been passed, including some very important ones that were stagnated have now been passed," he added.
The PMEAC Chairman said special emphasis was being given on production and capacity-creation in some key infrastructure sector that lies in the public domain. Also, efforts are being put to remove the bottleneck in completion of projects.
Stressing the need to speed up completion of projects to ensure less intervention in the growth path, he said, "However, there are other challenges in the form of land acquisition for projects and environmental concerns that need to be addressed."
Rangarajan also pointed out three major macro economic concerns for India that include taming inflation, controlling Current Account Deficit (CAD) and fiscal consolidation.
In the Economic Survey earlier this year, government had projected economic growth to be 6.1-6.7 percent in 2013-14 fiscal. During the April-June quarter, however, GDP growth fell to four-year low of 4.4 percent, compared to 5.4 percent in the year-ago period. -
