New Delhi, May 12 (Inditop.com) India will review how to sustain its robust growth in factory output in recent months, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma said Wednesday after fresh data showed a 13.5 percent expansion in industrial production during March.
Data on industrial production showed that despite the withdrawal of fiscal stimuli packages and the tightening of monetary policy, manufacturing output rose 14.3 percent in March, mining by 11 percent and electricity by 7.7 percent.
The cumulative growth for 2009-10 for these three sectors were 10.9 percent, 9.7 percent and 6 percent respectively, as per data data released by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation.
The country’s Index of Industrial Production (IIP) had expanded by 0.3 percent in March 2009 and 2.8 percent during the whole of 2008-09. During the previous fiscal, the index had grown by 10.4 percent.
“In terms of industries, as many as 14 out of the 17 industry groups have shown positive growth during the month of March 2010, as compared to the corresponding month of the previous year,” the ministry said in a statement.
Looking at the past year’s performance, industrial production had expanded by 15.1 percent in February, 16.7 percent in January and 17.6 percent in December, leaving the commerce minister happy after the sharp slowdown in the previous months.
“We will review to see if strong industrial output growth can be sustained,” Sharma told reporters on the margins of the annual session of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.
