The country’s economic growth was mainly attributed to increasing purchasing power of the people and is less dependent on external factors, a top official of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said on Tuesday. “...In India more and more people are incorporating themselves to higher levels of purchasing power.”
“That is increasingly fuelling the growth of India rather than exclusively relying on external factors. It is a more balanced structure,” the OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said in New Delhi.
He was talking to reporters after the inauguration of the four-day OECD World Fourm on 'Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making' that aims to gauge the social well being beyond the gross domestic product(GDP) indicator.
Gurria, however, said India cannot be insulated from the external factors. He said India's most important trading partners like the Euro zone (at zero or slightly negative), the US (below 2 per cent) and China (about 7.0-7.5 per cent) are not doing well in terms of economic growth. "...You have a worldwide trend. In case of India there is no exception that there is a slowdown which is happening everywhere," he said.
Inaugurating the Forum, the Minister of State for Statistics and Programme Implementation Srikant Kumar Jena said there is a need to measure objective and subjective well-being, sustainable growth, environmental security and other dimensions like education, health, income, personal safety apart from only measuring economic progress. "Due importance should also be given to measuring the sustainability, vulnerability, security, trust in institutions and governance, time–use, leisure, freedoms, and other non-monetary aspects of quality of life, besides measuring poverty and inequality," Jena said.
Besides, the former Reserve Bank governor Y V Reddy -- who took part in a panel discussion here -- hailed the recent decisions on economic reforms taken by the government. "I think the measures that have been announced in the recent past have added to good sentiments," Reddy told reporters on the sidelines of the event.