India can go back to 9% growth: Prime Minister

Mumbai: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said the present slowdown was not "inevitable or irreversible".

Addressing Convocation ceremony at IIT Bombay here, the Prime Minister said after half a century of zero rate of economic growth, from 1900 to 1950, India managed to register 3.5 percent growth for three decades after Independence, from 1950 to 1980. But from 1980 to now, over the subsequent three decades, the country nearly doubled that rate of growth.

"In 2003-08, we showed that we can march forward at an even higher rate of growth of 9 percent," he said.

"I know that in the past year India's economy has slowed down. But this is not an inevitable or irreversible outcome. The fundamentals of our economy are sound and with greater effort being made to mobilise all the latent physical and human resources, we can go back to the growth rate of 8 to 9 percent per annum achieved from 2003 to 2008," Singh said.

"The large investments in the development of human resources that we have made in the last eight years would facilitate that outcome," he said.

PTI