What’s in the news?

• According to the first advance estimates released by the National Statistical Office (NSO), India’s gross domestic product (GDP) will contract 7.7 per cent in the current financial year as against a growth of 4.2 per cent in the previous fiscal. It is mainly due to the sharp contraction in the services, manufacturing and mining sectors.
• The projected contraction reflects a loss of Rs 11.3 lakh crore of GDP in real absolute terms from last year.

Expenditure side

• Out of a total eight sectors, agriculture and electricity generation are the only two that are projected to be in positive territory, with an estimated growth rate of 3.4 per cent and 2.7 per cent respectively.
• On the expenditure side, except for government final consumption expenditure, which has been estimated to increase 5.8 per cent in FY21, other drivers of demand are down sharply: private consumption expenditure is expected to contract 9.5 per cent, and gross fixed capital formation — an indicator for private investment — is expected to contract 14.5 per cent.

NSO

• The National Statistical Office is the Statistics Wing of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
• In 2019, the central government merged the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) and National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) into the National Statistical Organisation.
• NSO is mandated with the following responsibilities:-
  • acts as the nodal agency for planned development of the statistical system in the country
  • compiles and releases the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) every month and conducts the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI);
  • organizes and conducts periodic all-India Economic Censuses
  • prepares national accounts as well as publishes annual estimates of national product, government and private consumption expenditure, capital formation, savings, etc. as also the state level gross capital formation of supra-regional sectors and prepares comparable estimates of State Domestic Product (SDP) at current prices;

Reference:

1. https://indianexpress.com/article/business/economy/gdp-to-contract-7-7-in-current-fiscal-advance-estimates-show-7137643/