India slowly regressing to the old Hindu rate of growth?

My punditry is perhaps no different from advertising in that perhaps half of what I say are correct, but the problem lies in not knowing which half it is!

Thus, it is always more than comforting when I can spot the instances where I have been correct all along, and then it turns out that those are not happy developments either. It is a bloody no-win situation.

For a while now, I have been blogging and writing op-eds on how not everything is going well in India, and that Indians ought to be really, really worried.  Instead, of course, Indians appear to care only for whatever happens in the cricket and movie worlds, while ignoring the phenomenally more urgent issues--like India's s(t)inking economy, about which, it turns out, I have been way more right than wrong.

The Economist reports that India's economic growth has considerably slowed down.  In its characteristic punning style, the magazine newspaper captioned it as "A Bric hits the wall":

perhaps most important—issue raised by lower growth is another kind of stability: social. India, unlike the other BRIC countries, is still desperately poor. One businessman and guru interviewed by your correspondent recently declared that "the next fifteen years will be India's worst since independence" and that there was a one-in-ten chance of a revolution. If India's economic miracle turns out to have been a mirage, it will not be so easy to dismiss that kind of talk as cranky. There is already widespread disgust at corruption. And at least ten million young folk will enter the workforce every year for the next decade or so. They will be coming to the big cities, looking for jobs that won't be created if India expands at a rickshaw rate of growth. Talk of a demographic dividend may turn back into talk of a time bomb.

 The Economist worries about the economic miracle having been a "mirage" while I have referred to it simply as a hype.  But, otherwise, we are referring to the same set of economic conditions.

The Hindu adds:

In tandem with a host of negative factors at home and abroad impacting the macro-economic environment, the country's GDP (gross domestic product) growth slumped to a nine-year low of 5.3 per cent during the fourth quarter (January-March) of 2011-12 as compared to a robust 9.2 per cent expansion in the same quarter of the previous fiscal. ...

The scale-down in growth rate for 2011-12 to 6.5 per cent — the lowest since 2002-03 when the economy grew by four per cent — disappointed both the government and the industry but came as no surprise as indications of a steady slowdown have been there for quite some time.

Disappointed with the dismal GDP figures, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, however, expressed cautious optimism and pointed to some signs of recovery in some select sectors. ...

In a statement, Mr. Mukherjee said: “GDP growth is the lowest in contemporary period. It has been substantially because of the very poor performance of manufacturing sector…The government would take all necessary steps to address imbalance on the fiscal front and on the current account. It would help in checking inflationary expectations and inspire confidence for improved capital inflows as well as recovery in domestic investment growth”.

This is the same finance minister, who, less than a month ago, stated:

 India was growing at over 9 per cent before the global financial crisis of 2008 pulled down the growth rate to 6.7 per cent in 2008-09. India has projected a growth rate of 7.6 per cent in 2012-13, up from 6.9 per cent recorded in the previous fiscal. 

Seriously!  It is a huge difference between 7.6 percent and 6.5 percent within four weeks, don't you think?

The good news: at least it is not 1991!

Bimal Jalan, Former Governor of the RBI showed confidence that the Indian economy has not gone back to the 1991 era yet.

Jalan was of the opinion that both the political and economic situation during the 1991 crisis was very difficult. He said that at present the economy has the strength to grow on the back of the industrial sector. He hoped that India will not be faced with a situation similar to the unprecedented external debt crisis of 1991. 

Well, I suppose the swearing in of the Indian cricket god, Sachin Tendulkar, as a member of the upper house of the parliament will by itself transform the sluggish economy, right?