Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday said the Indian economy was on a strong wicket with sound macro-economic fundamentals.
At a press briefing to detail state of the economy, he said India has been the fastest growing major economy for the last three years and the attempt was to maintain high growth rate in coming years.
In a presentation made at the briefing, Economic Affairs Secretary S.C. Garg said inflation had consistently come down since 2014 and will not cross 4% this fiscal.
Detailing macro-economic fundamentals, he said that current account deficit will be less than 2% this year and that foreign exchange reserves had crossed $400 billion.
On fiscal deficit, he said the government was committed to sticking to the target of 3.2% of GDP for the current fiscal but a review would be done in December.
Stating that the GDP growth slowdown had bottomed out and the economy was turning around, Mr Garg said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had recently projected that the country would achieve a 8% growth rate soon.
Mr. Garg further added that the government was confident of surpassing the disinvestment target of ₹72,500 crore for this fiscal.
Finance Secretary Ashok Lavasa said that total government expenditure so far this fiscal had been ₹11.47 lakh crore out of ₹21.46 lakh crore budgeted for this financial year.
Out of capital expenditure target of ₹3.09 lakh crore, ₹1.46 lakh crore had already been spent. Central public sector units had spent an additional ₹1.37 lakh crore out of their target of ₹3.85 lakh crore.
Mr. Lavasa said 83,677 km of road would be built in the next five years.
Banking sector non-performing assets (NPAs) rose from ₹2.75 lakh crore in March 2015 to ₹7.33 lakh crore as on June 2017, Department of Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said. Of that₹1.75 lakh crore related to just 12 cases, which have been referred to NCLT.