Slowest growth in four decades

Strict containment measures in response to the coronavirus outbreak in India will have severe economic repercussions. We think the economy will grow by just 1% in 2020, which would be the weakest pace of annual growth in four decades. And while the RBI has emphatically responded with aggressive monetary loosening, large-scale fiscal stimulus is also needed to support the most vulnerable during the lockdown and to prevent the drastic economic slowdown from morphing into an outright contraction in annual output. We have compressed this edition of the Outlook to focus it on the most timely indicators.