Budget 2020: PM Modi Meets Niti Aayog Experts To Find 'Cure' To Ailing Economy

India's GDP growth has been forecast to dip to an 11-year low of 5 per cent in the current fiscal, mainly due to poor showing by manufacturing and construction sectors, government data showed on Tuesday.

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New Delhi: PM Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with experts at the Niti Aayog to discuss the state of economy is currently underway in the national capital. The meeting is being attended by Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar, CEO Amitabh Kant and other senior officials of the think tank. Reports say the lagging economy has forced the government to step on the gas ahead of the Union Budget on February 1 with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself overseeing the Budget preparations to put the ailing economy back on track. Modi's meeting with economists at Niti Aayog today is to find the solution from the industry and experts themselves. He has in recent times held two mega meetings taking feedback from top industry captains, as well as over 10 meetings with different industrialists. Modi has given them a patient hearing and heard their version and suggestions and problems that requires to be sorted. Each Ministry has been asked to prepare a blueprint of 5-year vision plans and the Prime Minister has also spent considerable time in reviewing them. Modi himself as PM (not from PMO) sought feedback on Budget demands from the general public. Said a source though that it was not surprising the amount of time devoted by Prime Minister in trying to understand and find cure to the ailing economy as the budget was just around the corner in about three weeks. Modi is certainly overseeing the sectoral bottlenecks to revive the economy and what can be done in Budget to help the stressed economy. India's GDP growth has been forecast to dip to an 11-year low of 5 per cent in the current fiscal, mainly due to poor showing by manufacturing and construction sectors, government data showed on Tuesday. As per the first advance estimates of National Statistical Office (NSO), the manufacturing sector output growth will decelerate to 2 per cent in 2019-20, down from 6.9 per cent in the previous financial year. Likewise, the construction sector growth is estimated at 3.2 per cent as against 8.7 per cent in 2018-19. The previous low in economic growth was recorded at 3.1 per cent in 2008-09. The dismal performance for the fiscal was anticipated as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the first quarter was 5 per cent and 4.5 per cent in the subsequent three-months period. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had also lowered its forecast for the economic growth to 5 per cent while announcing its bi-monthly monetary policy last month. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is expected to present the Budget 2020-21 in Parliament on February 1. (With additional information from Agencies)