Year in Review: From job data to growth woes, India's 'shrinking' feeling

A list of events and policy decisions that made the biggest impact on Indian economy during the year 2019

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What Finance Minister Piyush Goyal presented hardly had any resemblance with the previous three interim Budgets presented by his predecessors — Jaswant Singh in 2004, Pranab Mukherjee in 2009 and Palaniappan Chidambaram in 2014. No interim Budget in the past had announced a new programme with as huge an annual expenditure outlay of Rs 75,000 crore as Goyal’s scheme, Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN), to offer an annual income support of Rs 6,000 per year to all farmer families with a cultivable land of up to two hectares. Read more...

2 / 11

The country's unemployment rate stood at a 45-year-high of 6.1 per cent in 2017-18, according to the NSSO's periodic labour force survey (PLFS). The report was at the centre of a controversy after two National Statistical Commission (NSC) members, including acting chairman, resigned alleging the government had withheld the release despite the NSC's approval. Read more...

3 / 11

In her Union Budget for 2019-20, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the country was well within its capacity to become a $5-trillion economy in the next five years. Read more...

4 / 11

The government significantly reduced the rate of corporation tax, boosting investor sentiment in the midst of a severe slowdown. Read more...

5 / 11

The government on November 4 said India would not join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) deal, adding that doing so would adversely affect its national interest. Read more...

6 / 11

On November 8, the third anniversary of the government’s demonetisation decision, global ratings agency Moody’s lowered its outlook on India’s credit ratings to “negative” from “stable”, citing an ongoing economic slowdown, financial stress among rural households, weak job creation, and the liquidity crunch in non-banking financial companies. Read more...

7 / 11

The government decided to scrap the National Statistical Office’s (NSO’s) consumer expenditure survey conducted in 2017-18 over “data quality” issues This survey had revealed that the country’s consumer spending had seen its first decline of four decades in 2017-18. Read more...

8 / 11

The Centre approved the Code on Industrial Relations (IR) Bill, 2019 — considered to be the most contentious labour law amendment. Read more...

9 / 11

India’s Gross domestic product (GDP) in the July-September quarter of 2019-20 grew at a slow rate of 4.5 per cent when compared with the same quarter a year earlier, and 5 per cent lower than the previous quarter, the data released by the National Statistical Office showed. Read more...

10 / 11

The government’s goods and services tax (GST) collections recovered to a seven-month high in November, crossing the Rs 1-trillion mark on account of festive-season demand and anti-evasion measures taken by the government. Read more...

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Consumer price index (CPI)-based inflation rose to a 40-month high of 5.54 per cent in November when compared with the same month the previous year. Vegetables, which became costlier in neighbourhood markets, contributed the most to lift the headline number. Vegetable inflation in November touched 30 per cent in villages and a staggering 48.6 per cent in cities and towns, data from the National Statistics Office (NSO) showed. Read more...