India’s Resilience Amid Global Economic Turmoil
India's economy has consistently advanced, even in challenging global scenarios, thanks to its robust market. This resilience was evident during the 2008-09 global recession, triggered by the collapse of American markets and the looming bankruptcy of major banks worldwide, which led to massive layoffs. During this period, the country's finance minister was the late Bharat Ratna Pranab Mukherjee. He maintained the stability of India's banking system through nationalized banks and prevented widespread layoffs. His strategy involved slightly reducing the salaries of top executives to avoid job cuts, effectively safeguarding the positions of lower-level employees.
Currently, there is turmoil in the economic environment due to the imposition of 50 percent duty by America on Indian imported goods. India is trying to counter this on the basis of its strength. It is being said that due to the US action, India's export business may suffer a huge setback, due to which about one crore jobs may be lost in various sectors. Therefore, the burden of saving these jobs has fallen on the Indian political leadership. To combat this, India's economy will have to find a solution based on its internal strength. One solution is to find markets in other countries of the world for the export of Indian goods.
The Indian government seems to be moving ahead in this direction and has prepared a list of about 40 countries where Indian goods can be exported. But in the meantime, India's economy also seems to be moving towards improvement because the gross production growth rate in the quarter from April to June of the current financial year has been 7.8 percent. This has been due to the excellent performance of the service sector and the permanent growth rate of the agriculture sector has been 3.7 percent. The growth rate of the service sector has been 9.3 percent which is the highest in the last two years. Along with this, the growth rate in the production sector has also been 7.7 percent. All the financial agencies of the world are saying that India is a country with a fast growing economy and its gross growth rate can be above 6.5 in the current financial year. The figures of the first quarter of the financial year show that we can achieve this growth rate but during this time America has also created an obstacle. US President Donald Trump is taking economic punitive action against India and is saying that India is buying crude petroleum oil from Russia which is giving strength to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. This allegation of Trump can be called completely baseless and even ridiculous because European countries including China are also doing energy business with Russia. Seeing this, it can be concluded that Trump is definitely irritated by India's progress. But in international politics, personal relations or beliefs do not have much value. Therefore, Trump will definitely realize his mistake one day and he will need India to balance diplomatic equations at the global level. This can be said in the context of China.
As far as India's relations with China are concerned, they are very strong at the economic level. This strength has been due to the border dispute between the two countries. From this, it can be concluded that China does not want to leave India's huge market because it exports more than four times more than it imports. But India's internal economic strength is such a power on the basis of which we can move forward continuously and show the world that despite American threats, India's development cannot be stopped. Previous governments have also done this, but if the growth rate of the production sector remains 7.7 percent in the first quarter of the current financial year, then we can maintain it on our own only when the demand for goods in the Indian markets continues to increase because the demand for exports to America will be less. On the other hand, our effort will be to end the tariff dispute with America. Even if the possibility of this remains negligible, India does not need to panic because we have not let Indian production fall by innovating during every crisis. But we have to be cautious on the currency exchange front because the rupee is continuously falling against the dollar. It has crossed the barrier of Rs 88 per dollar and has gone ahead. At present, all this is happening due to the US action. We have to take effective measures to keep the Indian currency strong.