New Delhi, Mar 12: Subdued performance of manufacturing sector, especially capital and consumer goods, pulled down the growth in industrial production to 1.7 per cent in January from 7.5 per cent a year ago.
The data of Index of Industrial Production (IIP), released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Tuesday comes ahead of the Reserve Bank's monetary policy statement on April 4 and may increase the clamour for cut in interest rates to boost economic activities. Meanwhile, the CSO has revised upwards the growth in IIP for December 2018 to 2.6 per cent from the earlier estimate of 2.4 per cent. As per the CSO data, the growth in manufacturing sector slowed to 1.3 per cent in January from 8.7 per cent in January 2018. There was also slump in the power generation segment as the expansion was almost flat at 0.8 per cent compared to 7.6 per cent in the year-ago month. However, the silver lining was the mining sector as it grew by 3.9 per cent in January this year compared to 0.3 per cent in the year-ago period. Giving more details about the factory output in the country, CSO said the capital goods segments, considered to be barometer of investment, witnessed a contraction and so was in case of intermediate goods segment. Data also revealed that both growth in production of consumer durable and non-durable goods too grew at slower rate in January compared to the year-ago period. The IIP growth during April-January period of the current fiscal stood at 4.4 per cent compared to 4.1 per cent in the same time frame a year ago. PTI