Better than in August. But 5% is the new normal.

"On a visit in August, India's prospects had rarely looked less promising," wrote Ruchir Sharma. "The economy was stumbling as badly as it had during the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the rout of the rupee in 2013. And a fear psychosis had gripped the nation." "Since then, however, conditions have changed." Since the 1980s, India's economy "has tended to rise and fall with the global economy". But, "India's economy began to decouple from the rest of the world in 2017, when it missed out on the synchronised global upswing, and has slowed more sharply than its peers in the subsequent years." Aparna Iyer takes issue with the Reserve Bank (RBI) for making inaccurate forecasts of retail inflation and the expected growth rate of GDP. Her anger is due to the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the RBI keeping interest rate unchanged at 5.15% at its last meeting on 5 December. "During 2011-13, the central bank was pulled up for consistently underestimating headline inflation," sniffed Iyer. "In the current fiscal year, RBI seems to have consistently overestimated gross domestic product (GDP) growth." That is because this is India. In 2011-13, both the Governor of the RBI and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were economists, but the Finance Minister P Chidambaram was not. Chidambaram wanted the RBI to cut interest rate in the face of high inflation and threatened to "walk alone" when it was kept unchanged, reminding us of the song by Tagore "If no one responds to your call, then go your own way alone". This time, both the Governor of RBI and the Prime Minister are not economists but the Finance Minister N Sitharaman definitely is. So she should devote all her energy in seeking out the exact growth rate of GDP and dispel any doubts regarding data being cooked. Instead, she "signalled a multi-pronged approach involving higher public expenditure, enhanced direct cash transfers, and smoother credit disbursals, noting that as much as Rs 5 trillion had been lent by banks via various schemes in October and November alone". Handouts and 'loan melas', not much different from what Janardhan Poojary of the Congress did, with Manmohan Singh as the governor of RBI. But, whereas the Congress did not rubbish reports of population surveys from the National Statistical Office (NSO) this government discredits the NSO when its report does not match administration data, wrote Prof Himanshu. "So much so that the chief statistician of India (CSI) along with another secretary of the government of India, has argued that responses to survey questions suggest a diminishing sense of nationalism." Citizens who give honest answers are anti-Indian. Sharma wrote that "for low income nations a 5% growth rate is the new benchmark of success". What if, even that is cooked?