After historic contraction of almost 24 percent in the June quarter, Indian economy is on the road to recovery. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now expecting India to be the only large economy to clock double-digit growth in FY22.

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The IMF’s forecast has increased from 8.8 percent earlier to 11.5 percent.

All eyes are on Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as she gets ready to present the budget and the industry is hoping for more measures to boost growth and give the manufacturing sector, which has seen a recovery a further fillip.

Will the finance minister deliver a milestone budget like 1991? To discuss this, CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan spoke to Prashant Kumar, MD & CEO of Yes Bank; Suresh Narayanan, Chairman - Food Processing at CII and Chairman and Managing Director at Nestle India; Dr. Naresh Trehan, Cardiovascular Surgeon; Elias George, Partner & Head- Infra at KPMG; and Kamal Bali, President & MD at Volvo India.

Prashant Kumar said, “There is lot of credit demand which is coming from all the sectors - retail, MSME, we are also seeing like collection efficiencies are also reaching to the pre-COVID levels and also in terms of the throughput through our accounts and the cheque bounce have already come back to the pre-COVID levels. So these are pretty encouraging trends in terms of improvement in the economy. What we need to see that whatever improvement has happened how it can be sustained and how it would be supported by both monetary and fiscal support.”

On consumption, Suresh Narayanan said, “I represent the consumption part of the economy, the consumption primarily in consumer goods, and I must say that the comeback has been fairly heartening. In the recent past, the results for corporates also in the consumption space and these have been very encouraging results. So fundamentally, what is now here to stay is a comeback in terms of consumption.”

On healthcare, Dr. Naresh Trehan said, “We have understood by this terrible pandemic that we have been through that the healthcare structure is pretty wobbly and the fact remains that they are two parallel healthcare systems running in India, the government which has quite a bit of robust system and then there is a large private sector also which actually provides a high percentage of the healthcare to our public."

"The first thing you need to do is to align the public sector and the private sector in their healthcare delivery systems and make it into one string because whatever infrastructure is existing and if it was used efficiently today we can deliver at least 30-50 percent more healthcare to our people without building too many more beds.”

On infrastructure, Elias George said, “There is a huge expectation around the budget that the Rs 110 trillion package of national infrastructure pipeline will be revived, there will be a Development Financial Institution (DFI) for infrastructure spends around the corner with much more regulatory teeth and hopefully there will also be parallel play in the state governments.”

Watch this video for more

(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)

First Published:Jan 28, 2021 9:24 PM IST