India’s GDP growth falls to slowest pace since 2013

Growth in India’s economic output slowed to its weakest since the first quarter of 2013, according to Reuters, and was down from the 5% registered for the previous three months.

The South Asian country is currently facing a number of challenges. Apart from an economic slowdown, there is an ongoing crisis in the financial sector, which has hamstrung lending.

Growth in India’s economic output slowed to 4.5% in the three months that ended in September — and experts are predicting a further slowdown for the world’s seventh-largest economy.

Growth slowed to its weakest since the first quarter of 2013, according to Reuters, and was down from the 5% registered for the previous three months.

“High frequency indicators continued to trend lower in September, with industrial production clocking its worst decline in eight years,” Sanjay Mathur, chief economist for Southeast Asia and India, and Rini Sen, an India economist, at ANZ wrote in a research note. ANZ has downgraded its full fiscal-year growth forecast from 5.8% to 5.1%, the note said.

Singapore’s DBS Group held a conservative estimate of 4.3% growth for the third quarter of 2019. On average, economists polled by Reuters said they expected growth to be 4.7% for the period, or down from 7% for the same period in 2018.