At 7.5%, India to be fastest-growing major economy this year: Modi

New Delhi: India is expected to grow by 7.5% this year, making it the fastest-growing major economy on the back of the government’s initiatives in technology-led growth, ease of doing business and the digital sector, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday.

Modi made the remarks while addressing the virtual inaugural ceremony of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (Brics) Business Forum, which was held ahead of the grouping’s virtual summit on Thursday. 

He said the role of the Brics member states had become important as the world focuses on post-Covid recovery.

“This year, we are expecting 7.5% growth, which makes us the fastest-growing major economy. Transformative changes are taking place in every sector in the emerging ‘New India’,” he said, speaking in Hindi.

India adopted the mantra of “reform, perform and transform” to deal with economic problems arising from the pandemic, and the results of this approach are “evident from the performance of the Indian economy”, he said.

Modi listed four pillars responsible for the Indian economy’s recovery – technology-led growth, efforts to improve the ease of doing business, improvement of infrastructure and digital transformation.

India to invest $223 billion to meet its 2030 climate goals

New Delhi: India will need a $223 billion investment to meet its wind and solar capacity goals for 2030, according to a new report released by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF).

PM Modi announced five decarbonisation goals for India at the Glasgow climate summit on November 1 last year, which he called the “panchamrit” (nectar distilled from five ingredients; in this case, the five promises). 

These include: India’s non-fossil energy capacity will reach 500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, meeting 50% of the country’s energy requirements by then.

PM Modi also committed that India will reduce its total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030, reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2030, over 2005 levels, and achieve net-zero emissions by 2070. 

But he underlined that such ambitious action will be impossible without adequate climate finance from developed nations and asked rich countries to make $ 1 trillion billion available as climate finance “as soon as possible.”

The BloombergNEF report titled “Financing India’s 2030 Renewables Ambition” said corporate commitments from Indian power companies could help India achieve 86% of its 2030 goals of building 500GW of cumulative renewable energy generation capacity.

India has already installed 165GW of renewable energy by 2021. 

India has already invested around $75 billion in renewable energy in the past eight years between 2014 to 2021 to install 165 GW of renewable energy which now needs to treble to $ 223 billion to meet India’s 500 GW goal by 2030, the report said.

Image courtesy of (File photo)

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