The International Monetary Fund’s April outlook pointed in different directions for Asia’s two largest economies. It raised India’s 2024 growth forecast by 0.3 percentage point to 6.8 percent, while retaining a forecast for China’s growth to slow to 4.6 percent in 2024 from 5.2 percent in 2023.
The change followed an earlier upgrade. When the IMF released its latest World Economic Outlook report on 30 January, it forecast 6.5 percent growth for India in 2024, a figure 0.2 percentage points above its October 2023 forecast.
On 18 April 2024, the fund published a revised World Economic Outlook and added a further 0.3 percentage point to its India forecast.
It also kept its projection for India’s gross domestic product growth at 7 percent for the fiscal year ending 31 March 2025.
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist, said the global economy had held up despite inflation pressures. “The global economy continues to show remarkable resilience, thanks to steadily declining inflation and stable growth.”
Gourinchas also said on Tuesday: “We find that the global economy remains quite resilient.”
The Reserve Bank of India’s latest monthly bulletin said India was set to remain the world’s fastest-growing major economy in 2025-26.
The scale of the economy has grown sharply over the past decade. India’s GDP at current prices stood at USD 2.1 trillion in 2015, and IMF data put the figure at USD 4.2 trillion over the last decade.
World Bank World Development Indicators put India’s nominal GDP at $3.96 trillion in 2025. The same dataset recorded consumer price inflation of 2.4 percent in 2025.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data showed real GDP growth of 8.1 percent year-over-year as of Q2 2026.
Economic Survey 2024-25 said India would need to sustain average growth of 8 percent over the next two decades to become a developed nation by 2047.
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