RBI lowers growth forecast to 7.3% for FY18

The Reserve Bank today marginally lowered the economic growth forecast for the current fiscal to 7.3 per cent even as it hoped that remonetisation would enable pick-up in consumer spending, especially in the cash-intensive segments.


The Central Statistics Office has pegged the growth of real gross value added for 2016-17 at 6.6 per cent, 0.1 percentage point lower than the second advance estimates released in February 2017.


"With the CSO's provisional estimates for 2016-17, the projection of real GVA growth for 2017-18 has accordingly been revised 10 bps downwards from the April 2017 projection to 7.3 per cent, with risks evenly balanced," the central bank said in its second bi-monthly monetary policy, 2017-18.