India's economy will grow at close to 7 per cent during the ongoing fiscal, Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of EAC to PM, said on Friday.
Addressing a programme at the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, he said there is a need to counter global narratives built on "absurd and irrelevant" data points, and India's second-largest rating agency CareEdge will soon start publishing sovereign ratings.
He said that backed by manufacturing, the economy grew by 7.6 per cent in the July-September quarter, well above expectations.
"We will be growing at somewhat close to 7 per cent for the year, and that would easily make us the world's fastest-growing," he said.
Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council (EAC) to the Prime Minister, said that for too long, India's growth has been defined by others.
"It's time we start taking control of our own narrative and defining ourselves on our own terms," he said.
"We need to create our own indices and do our own sovereign ratings. CareEdge will begin publishing these readings (sovereign ratings) in the next few months, followed by indices on democracy, freedom, sustainability and corporate governance within the next year," he added.
He, however, said that India cannot ignore the existing global indices as they currently hold a 20 per cent weightage on investment and cost of capital. Sanyal also reaffirmed the government's commitment to increasing the share of manufacturing in the GDP mix.
He highlighted several ongoing initiatives, including Production-Linked Incentives (PLI), aimed at achieving this goal.
"We are putting a very big effort into getting manufacturing going in India. A lot of effort has been put in, for example protecting Indian companies from Chinese dumping, which happens all the time.
"It's not perfect, but we are providing some protection. We do not want to go too far with it because our own history tells us that if we over-protect our industry what will happen is the Ambassador car... But, we will do where we need to provide protection," he said.
