Economic Survey 2021-22: Highlights
The Economic Survey 2021-22 was tabled in Parliament by the Finance Minister soon after the President’s address to both Houses of Parliament.
- The central theme of this year’s Economic Survey is the “Agile approach”, implemented through India’s economic response to the COVID-19 Pandemic shock.
- The preface of Economic Survey states that the “Agile approach” is based on feed-back loops, real-time monitoring of actual outcomes, flexible responses, safety-net buffers and so on.
- The Economic Survey 2021-22 argues that some form of feedback loop based policy-making was always possible, but the “Agile framework: is particularly relevant today because of the explosion of real-time data that allows for constant monitoring.
- Such information includes GST collections, digital payments, satellite photographs, electricity production, cargo movements, internal/external trade, infrastructure roll-out, delivery of various schemes, mobility indicators, to name just a few.
- Another theme highlighted in this Economic Survey relates to the art and science of policy-making under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
- The Preface also takes a bird’s eye view of the “great deal of evolution” of the Economic Surveys presented since the first Survey in 1950-51.
- This year’s survey uses various examples to highlight the use of satellite and geospatial data to reflect the infrastructural growth in the country.
- India’s GDP is projected to grow in real terms by 8.0-8.5 percent in 2022-23.
- The economy is expected to grow at 9.2 percent in the current fiscal.
- The Indian economy, as seen in quarterly estimates of GDP, has been staging a sustained recovery since the second half of 2020-21.
- Although the second wave of the pandemic in April-June 2021 was more severe from a health perspective, the economic impact was muted compared to the national lockdown of the previous year.
- As per the survey, the growth in 2022-23 will be supported by widespread vaccine coverage, gains from supply-side reforms and easing of regulations, robust export growth and availability of fiscal space to ramp up capital spending.
- The agricultural sector was the least impacted by the pandemic. It is estimated to grow 3.9 percent in 2021-22 on top of 3.6 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively, in the previous two years.
- The industrial sector went through a big swing by first contracting by 7 percent in 2020-21 and then expanding by 11.8 percent in this financial year.
- Overall, the sector is estimated to grow by 8.2 percent in 2021-22.
- Imports are expected to grow by 29.4 per cent in 2021-22, surpassing corresponding pre-pandemic levels.
- Startups in India have grown remarkably over the last six years. India has now become the third largest startup ecosystem in the world after the US and China.
- Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is currently the single largest retail payment system in the country in terms of volume of transactions, with 4.6 billion transactions worth Rs 8.26 lakh crore carried out in December 2021.
- The top five sectors which capture around 83 percent of the aggregate pipeline value include: Roads (27 percent) followed by Railways (25 percent), Power (15 percent), oil & gas pipelines (8 percent) and Telecom (6 percent).
- The Economic Survey has highlighted that privatisation of Air India has been particularly important for boosting the privatisation drive and garnering disinvestment proceeds.
- The primary markets has seen a boom in fundraising through IPOs by many new age companies in the year 2021-22 so far. Rs 89,066 crore was raised via 75 IPO issued in April-November 2021.
- As per the Economic Survey 2022, climate finance will remain critical to successful climate action for India to achieve its Net Zero Carbon Emission target by 2070.
