Fiscal deficit to remain below 4.8 percent in FY'14: Finance Minister

25 Apr 2013 Evaluate

Dismissing the apprehension of rise in fiscal deficit, Finance Minister P Chidambaram has said that India’s fiscal deficit will be kept below 4.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in FY14. Finance Minister said that fiscal deficit target is a red line that would never be breached and stated that in current situation, the current account deficit (CAD) situation is more worrying than fiscal deficit. Though, he expressed his optimism that CAD will be below 5 percent in 2012-13 and the fiscal deficit for FY13 will be around 5 percent of GDP.

Chidambaram emphasized that the government is on the fiscal consolidation path and has taken number of measures, which are focused on compressing expenditure and making extra efforts to improve revenue collection. The government has aimed to bring the fiscal deficit at the level of 3 percent by 2016-17. To contain the widening CAD, finance minister said that it may be difficult to dramatically increase exports due to the prevailing global economic slowdown and India may have to look at ways to restrain imports. The current account deficit (CAD) reached an all-time high of 6.7 percent of GDP in the third quarter of FY13. He also dispelled the concern of India’s deficit being mainly financed by short-term volatile foreign institutional investor inflows, as foreign institutional investments in India have always seen a growth except for one year after the global financial crisis.

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