With the global economic crisis showing “several signs of stress”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday India’s growth rate will take a hit this year.
“We have grown at an average of 8.4 per cent in the past five years. Like other countries we, too, have slowed down in 2011, but we still expect to grow at around 7.5 per cent. However, none of us can prosper in isolation to the rest of the world,” Singh told world leaders at the East Asia Summit. He acknowledged Asia’s emerging economies, having weathered the headwinds to some extent, were “growing well” and were, “in fact, contributing to the recovery of the world economy”.
Although economies in the region expect to see expansion next year, a handful, such as Singapore and Indonesian, have already cut back on their growth forecast.
PM-GILLARD IN NUCLEAR ‘PULL ASIDE’
With world leaders running short of time during this recent run of summits —the Cannes G20, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting and now the Asean and East Asia Summits all have been held in the space of a month —‘pull asides’, or quick unscheduled meetings, have become the flavour of the season. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Australian counterpart Julia Gillard had their own ‘pull aside’ this afternoon, with the sale of uranium to India being on the agenda. It is understood that Gillard informed Singh about the steps being taken on her side to allow Australia to export uranium to India, which was so far stalled as New Delhi is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Gillard is expected to raise the issue at her party’s national conference scheduled next month, after having stated her intentions for undertaking the change in uranium export policy earlier this week.