India has shown sustained economic growth since Covid: CEA Nageswaran
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Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran today said the Indian economy has shown resilience in the last ten to twelve years and sustained economic growth has been visible since Covid.
“The Indian economy has shown resilience in the last ten to twelve years. Despite global shocks since Covid, sustained GDP growth has been witnessed,” Nageswaran said in his address at the Assocham FinTech Festival, 2026.
Nageswaran said India is among few countries which have logged over 7% economic growth in real terms since Covid. “You can imagine that every year or two, there has been a major external shock. Covid, the Ukraine-Russia war, the energy shock, and 2025 onwards, it has been tariffs and then conflict. But post covid, there have been very few countries which have maintained a sustained growth rate of over 7% in real terms,” Nageswaran said.
He added that there are only three or four countries which have seen their public debt ratios coming down. “Fiscal deficit has also come down from 9.2% to 4.4% as of last year. The point is that the supply side potential of the economy has been enhanced. That is a big achievement and the second factor that goes along with it is the resilience,” he added.
“The third dimension is that the growth pick up has happened along with the fact that the average inflation rate has come down from what it used to be in the first six seven decades. It is now lower and converging with the developed world’s average inflation of around 3% to 4%. So, the fact that you could sustain a high growth rate along with inflation converging towards developed country average is an important achievement,” said Nageswaran.
Nageswaran said the current government inherited multiple macro-economic challenges such as high fiscal deficit and current account deficit and balance sheet problems.
“That was the inherited situation. So, the rest of the decade went into repairing balance sheets, allowing the corporates to repair and helping the public sector banking system to repair their balance sheets,” Nageswaran said.
“By the time the bank and corporate balance sheet had been fixed, we had housing finance and NBFC issues in 2018 -19, after which the pandemic hit,” he said.