WEF India Economic Summit 2019: RBI’s Rate Cut Reflects India’s Ambition To Boost Economic Growth, Says NITI Aayog
There is going to be a continued focus on improving investment, business climate in India across states, says NITI Aayog’s Kumar.
NITI Aayog Vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar said the RBI's fifth consecutive rate cut reflects India's overall ambition to accelerate economic growth to touch 8 percent sooner rather than later.
Kumar said with several steps taken by the government in the past couple of months to boost the economy, growth is expected to be around 6.5 percent this year, although it is "lower than expected", speaking here at the India Economic Summit.
"And we do want to have this growth probably at 6.5 percent this year, which is lower than what we expect. We want it to go up to 8 percent sooner rather than later," he said.
The central bank on Friday cut its benchmark lending rate by 0.25 percent to revive growth that has hit a six-year low at 5 percent in April-June period.
With the reduction, the repo rate, at which it lends to the system, will come down to 5.15 percent. It will bring down borrowing costs for home and auto loans, which are now directly linked to this benchmark.
We have a very ambitious growth target," Kumar said stressing that India is achieving progress on raising the growth rate to higher trajectory and sustaining it.
The bottom line is, there is going to be a continued focus on improving investment and business climate in India across states, he said. "The only thing we want to do now is to attract more long-term funding .”