Growth in India is forecast to remain strong, with the robustness reflecting continuing strength in domestic demand and a rising working age population, the IMF said.

The International Monetary Fund has revised India's GDP growth upwards for the ongoing fiscal. The International Monetary Fund now projects India's GDP to grow 6.8%, a 30 basis points revision from its forecast in January, according to the World Economic Outlook published on Tuesday. For FY26, it projects India's GDP to grow by 6.5%.

Growth in India is forecast to remain strong, with the robustness reflecting continuing strength in domestic demand and a rising working age population, the IMF said.

China GDP growth forecast has been retained at 4.6% for 2024, and 4.1% for 2025. It has also raised US GDP growth forecast by 60 basis points to 2.7% and 1.9% for 2025.

The five largest emerging market economies—Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Russia—contributed approximately 0.8 percentage point of the 1.8 percentage point drop in projected global growth.

Global growth, estimated at 3.2% in 2023, is projected to continue at the same pace in 2024 and 2025. The forecast for 2024 is revised upwards by 0.1 percentage point from the January 2024 update, and by 0.3 percentage point from October last year.

The pace of expansion is low by historical standards, owing to both near-term factors, such as still-high borrowing costs and withdrawal of fiscal support, and longer-term effects from the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; weak growth in productivity; and increasing geo-economic fragmentation, the report explained.

Global headline inflation is expected to fall from an annual average of 6.8% in 2023 to 5.9% in 2024 and 4.5% in 2025, with advanced economies returning to their inflation targets sooner than emerging market and developing economies. The latest forecast for global growth five years from now—at 3.1%—is at its lowest in decades.

(With Inputs From International Agency)