India can achieve 7 per cent growth this year, says Montek

India is in a position to boost its economic growth rate in the July-September quarter and could achieve 6.5 to 7 per cent growth by the end of the fiscal year in March 2013, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and a key government adviser, said on Friday.
The country's GDP grew at 5.3 per cent in the March quarter, its lowest level in nine years.

''Growth has decelerated more than we expected. We should see a turnaround … 6.5-7 per cent is possible,'' Ahluwalia said at a function in Mumbai organised by management consultancy firm Skoch in Mumbai, with the theme of 'refuelling growth'.

The meeting was attended by several other heads of quasi-government bodies, including U K Sinha, chairman of the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

Sinha in his speech had expressed anguish at the snail's pace of reforms in the financial sector. (See: How long can reforms wait, asks SEBI chief Sinha)

Ahluwalia refused to comment directly on whether the Reserve Bank of India was likely to cut policy rates in its mid-quarter monetary policy review on 17 June, but said, ''Inflation is not at comfortable level. Monetary policy should be forward looking.'' He added that that while the repo rate (short-term policy rate) was playing an important role, a long-term view on rates was also important.

He said the government was doing everything to remove supply-side ''constraints'', which the government holds responsible for galloping inflation rather than its own incompetence.

Using power generation as an example, the de facto head of the Planning Commission said, ''We have made lot of progress in power generation. But fuel is a constraint.''

He gave no indication of what steps the government would take to remove these ''constraints''