Kamath's take on the economy

The Indian economy is growing faster than the officially quoted 8%-8.5% GDP growth rate, says KV Kamath, the newly appointed chairman of Infosys Technologies. At a meet-the-press event, Kamath said India is actually growing at 11%-12%. Kamath said economic data used to compute growth rates is not accurate. “As long as we don’t have the right statistics, there is a question over the growth rate,” he said. There are uncounted and unaccounted figures which could easily add another 3-4 percentage points to India’s GDP, he said. India, he said, is thus growing at the double-digit rates we have become used to seeing in China in recent years and in Japan in the 1980s. K V Kamath said India’s per capita income stands where China was 10 years ago, and in the next 10 years, it will stand at where China’s per capita income stands today. The manufacturing sector must further expand as it has the capacity to generate largescale employment. Infrastructure bottlenecks must be addressed as they hinder development. Also, consumer demand must be kept robust to drive the economy. He said technology too could help in greater percolation of benefits to the poor. The use of the unique identification platform for cashtransfer schemes using Aadhaar-linked bank accounts would prevent leakages in subsidy programmes like LPG and kerosene. On the high interest rate environment, Kamath said the most affected would be retail customers who take home loans, auto loans, etc. Businesses can tide over these times with internal accruals, he said. For the IT sector, Kamath said the sovereign debt concerns in Europe and the visa row and job slowdown in the US were not causes of major concern.