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Notwithstanding high crude oil prices and increased uncertainty due climate changes, NITI Aayog member Arvind Virmani has expressed optimism over economic condition of India and said that the country’s economy will grow at around 6.5 per cent in the current fiscal (FY24). He also asserted that the gross household savings ratio in India has consistently gone up. He said ‘My growth projection (of India's GDP growth) is 6.5 per cent plus minus 0.5 per cent... because my experience is that the fluctuations in global GDP more or less has balanced out for us, assuming normal changes'.

He said ‘... if we look back 10 years ago... Saudi Arabia and the USA were more or less on the same geopolitical platform, and they used to coordinate things... but that has changed in the last five years’. International crude oil prices have breached the $90 per barrel mark for the first time in 10 months and are currently hovering around $92 per barrel. He added ‘Recently, we have seen that it (Saudi Arabia) cut down on oil production when oil prices started going to reasonable levels, and so did Russia’. According to Virmani, the issue of El Nino conditions has come up again and the uncertainty has increased because of climate change.

He further said the net household saving is falling down, not the gross household savings. The gross household savings ratio has consistently gone up. The net household savings ratio is going down because consumer debt is increasing faster. He emphasised that as far as food inflation is concerned, the government has managed it reasonably well. Retail inflation declined to 6.83 per cent in August after touching a 15-month high of 7.44 per cent in July, mainly due to softening prices of vegetables, but still remains above the Reserve Bank's comfort zone. Meanwhile, India's real GDP growth was 7.8 per cent on a year-on-year basis in Q1 FY24. India's GDP growth in 2022-23 was 7.2 per cent, lower than 9.1 per cent in 2021-22.