The Asian Development Bank (ADB) sees Indian economy growing at 7-7.5 per cent this fiscal, lower than the 7.9 per cent growth forecast by it around September last year.

The economic growth is likely to be weighed down by the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone countries and internal problems such as relatively high inflation and infrastructural bottlenecks, said Mr Bindu Lohani, ADB's Vice-President for Knowledge Management and Sustainable Development.

Eurozone crisis impact

Mr Lohani, who was in the Capital for the annual Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, said that he does see the Eurozone crisis having some impact on India, both in the form of investments coming in as well as trade problems.

This knowledge is there among policy makers in India, but the real question is whether India will quickly diversify its markets, Mr Lohani told Business line here.

However, he noted that the impact on India will not be as big as in China, Korea, Singapore and East Asian economies which are heavily exporting to the US and Europe.

“We think India can always do better. It should be prepared for it”.

Green growth

Meanwhile, the ADB said that Asia can lead on green growth by working with private sector.

This multilateral development bank supports green growth and sustainable development through mechanisms such as the climate investment fund.

clean energy investment

In less than 10 years, ADB's annual clean energy investment has gone from $225 million in 2003 to nearly $2.2 billion in 2011.

“The target today is to do about $2 billion a year — overall including India. This will be only our financing and we will leverage this financing (with private sector)”.

The demand from developing member countries for clean energy investments is only going to increase in the future, according to Mr Lohani.

>krsrivats@thehindu.co.in

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