The meeting between Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and top industrialists, including Ratan Tata, Anil Ambani, Sunil Mittal and Anand Mahindra, began in New Delhi on Monday to discuss the current economic scenario.Other top industry leaders like Narayana Murthy, Shashi Ruia, Y C Deveshwar, Sunil Munjal, Venu Srinivasan, GVK Reddy, GM Rao and RP Goenka are also participating in the discussion.
Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma and top officials like Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar and Financial Services Secretary D K Mittal are also attending the meeting.
The meeting assumes significance as there are visible signs of slugishness in the different economic indicators like industrial production and rising cost of inputs.
Coincidentally, the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council today lowered India's GDP growth forecast for the current fiscal to 8.2 per cent, against earlier estimates of around nine per
cent.
The industry is reeling under a high interest regime for quite sometime now as the Reserve bank has been hiking key policy rates since March 2010 in its bid to check rising inflation.
To tame inflation, which has remained close to double digit mark through April-June quarter, the Reserve Bank has hiked interest rates three times so far this fiscal.
Industry is of the view that rising interest rates is increasing the input cost as loans are getting costlier.
The impact of slowing credit is also visible in industrial output growth rate, which dipped to a nine-month low of 5.6 per cent in May due to poor show of manufacturing and mining sectors and lower off take of capital goods.
