May their tribe grow: Tiger population rises to 2,226

Tiger population in the country is estimated to be around 2,226, a rise of over 30 per cent since the last count in 2010, according to the latest census report released on Tuesday.

The total number of tigers were estimated to be around 1,706 in 2010. Tiger population had dipped to an alarming 1,411 in 2006 but has improved since then.

Releasing the country wide tiger assessment report for 2014, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar termed it as a “success story” and noted that while the tiger population is falling in the world, it is rising in India.

“Most of the tigers in the world are presently in India. 70 per cent of the world’s tigers are now in India. We have the world’s best managed tiger reserves.

“When we last counted the tigers, it was 1,706. The latest estimation shows there are 2,226 tigers. We must be proud of our legacy. We have increased by 30 per cent from the last count. That is a huge success story,” Mr. Javadekar said.

He said that India has unique photographs of 80 per cent of tigers while stating that around 9,735 cameras were used in the estimation. He claimed that nowhere in the world, so many cameras have been used for such an exercise.

The report said that the total estimated population of tigers was somewhere around 1,945-2491 (2,226) as per 2014 report while as per the 2010 report, it was between 1,520 and1909.

The third round of country level tiger assessment using the refined methodology of doubling sampling using camera traps has recorded an increase in tiger population.

“In 2006, the mid value of such a (once in four years) snap shot assessment using the same methodology was 1,411, in 2010 it was 1706 and now in 2014, it stands at 2,226. This is an increase of almost 30.5 per cent since the last estimate,” an official statement said.

Officials said that a total of 3,78,118 sq km of forest area in 18 tiger states were surveyed with a total of 1,540 unique tiger photo captures.

Tiger population has increased in several states like Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerela, officials said.

Mr. Javadekar credited the combined efforts of officers, forest guards, community participation and scientific approach for the rise in tiger population.

“That is why we want to create more tiger reserves. This is a proof of India’s biodiversity and how we care for mitigating climate change. This is India’s steps in the right direction which the world will applaud,” he said.

Talking about human-animal conflict, the Environment Minister said that “proactive” steps will be taken in this regard.

“We must ensure animal-human conflict does not happen. We have proactively decided that we will create more grasslands and water storage in forest areas so that animals can live well,” he said.

He said that problem was more acute where elephants were concerned.

While in case of tigers it was seven deaths, around 100 people had died in such conflicts with elephants.

“We have to avoid this... If we put all deaths of human-animal conflict, it becomes 300 and more which means we are losing one person per day and that should not happen. We are taking new initiatives,” he told reporters later.

The third round of independent management effectiveness evaluation of tiger reserves has shown an overall improvement in the score of 43 tiger reserves from 65 per cent in 2010-11 to 69 per cent in 2014, officials said.

An economic valuation of six tiger reserves done for the first time has provided quantitative and qualitative estimates of benefits accruing from tiger reserves which include ecological, economic, social and cultural services, they said.

A compendium on the profile of tiger reserves was also released besides a report on corridors and a book on tiger dynamics. Several tiger reserves were also recognised for excelling in select thematic areas.

Memories of Jawaharlal Nehru

An eminent scientist and educationist recalls the various facets of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, as empathetic listener, concerned politician, and a keen observer of science

In the summer of 1945 when I was in a summer camp of the Students’ Congress on the bank of the river Ravi in Lahore, Jawaharlal Nehru came to the city after being released from jail. We all went to the railway station to receive him. I could not get anywhere close to him and was pushed to the edge of the large crowd gathered outside the railway station. A platform had been built and Nehru stood at the centre, trying to quieten the very large crowd while attempting to persuade it to allow some of the distinguished friends to join him on the central stage. I was a little amused at his belief that the dense crowd could be so persuaded. But pretty soon, I found that Nehru had disappeared in the middle of the crowd, and using his brief baton streaking a path through which he managed to get Dr. Khan Sahib (Khan Abdul Jaffar Khan) to walk through to the central stage! This impressive accomplishment was done through a magical persuasion of the crowd. I began to feel that he did have a special relation with people in numbers.

The same afternoon Jawaharlal, responding to our invitation, came to visit us in our study camp. We eagerly gathered in a small tent which was furnished with a table and a chair for him. He started chatting with us as he walked in and was escorted to the single chair and we all sat on the floor in front of him. Our secretary walked next to his chair and pulled out a large sheet of paper on which he had written the welcome address he had prepared. We were all eager to hear how he would address this supreme leader of India and share his desire of joining him in our struggle for Independence. He looked at him and declaimed in a vibrating voice making flattering references to him, and stopped, because he saw Nehru rising from his chair. Nehru ordered him to stop and said that he had not come here to listen to this nonsense. “Sit down and let us talk,” he said. The speed at which he dispensed with formalities struck us, as did his passion and seriousness. “We have a war of independence to fight.” I do not remember everything he said, but I do remember we were all ready to walk with him ...

My brother ’s interaction

I had once visited Shahdara in Delhi to listen to Nehru speak. I found the way to get to the lecture venue. It was pretty disorganised and very crowded. The bus service was almost non-existent. We waited a long time for Nehru to appear and after he finished speaking, we started trying to find a bus back to New Delhi, a rather difficult enterprise. As night descended, I was concerned for my mother waiting at home; she would worry that I would lose my way in the then riot-torn Delhi.

“Nehru could talk to scientists with great ease. There were deep friendships with people like Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and some others”

When I finally reached home at about 1.30 a.m., I learnt that my brother, Omi, decided that the only sensible way of finding out the time at which the function in Shahdara got over was to somehow get the time from the Prime Minister himself. The Prime Minister was available on call and gracious enough to respond personally and give assurance of help to the boy in case he needed it.

Omi remembered that there was a big public telephone booth near India Gate. He took out a chawani from his pocket and dialled the number of the Prime Minister. When it was answered by a “hello,” Omi immediately asked, “Is this Panditji’s home?” The answer was immediate, “Yes, brother, this is Jawaharlal speaking. Tell me what’s the matter.”

The Prime Minister understood my mother’s worries and appreciated Omi’s clever way of finding when his brother could be expected to return home. Omi was told to wait another half-hour and get back if I had still not returned ...

At the Kingsway refugee camp

Unaccompanied by any security, Nehru visited the refugee camp in Delhi to express his pain and unhappiness at the terrible attack on occupants of the servants’ quarters of the neighbouring infectious diseases hospital.

Nehru was convinced that the attack and the killing was most likely by some of the refugees in the camp. Steeped in sorrow and anger, he shouted, “I feel like blowing this camp into smithereens.” He sat down and started talking to the refugees in quiet words asking them if it was to perpetuate violence that everyone had fought for Independence. He even went on to observe that he thought the people were not worthy of Independence at all if such behaviour was to continue. He also said that a lot of people were ashamed of the violence but also deep in pain. After that there was calm in the camp as Nehru had shared the grief of the refugees. But then one boy stood up and started shouting, asking, ‘What do we do when our people are getting killed and continue to get killed?’ at which Nehru held him tight and shook him and asked if retaliation would ensure the violence stops. At least someone should have the maturity to cease violence. Then he embraced the boy and sat down for a quiet talk...almost a quiet cry together ...

Contribution to science

Nehru could talk to scientists with great ease. There were deep friendships with people like Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Hussain Zaheer and some others. He pioneered the scientific temper movement. You do not have to be doing quantum mechanics or electromagnetic theory to have a scientific temper, though it might help. It implies greater freedom to be different, less constraints and more freedom to fly. It also demands that all points of view might have ab initio rights, prejudice has less chance to reign and seniority need not always rule.

Nehru visited the Ooty Cosmic Ray Laboratory without fanfare or publicity, accompanied by party colleague K. Kamaraj. The visit happened because I had enquired the Director of my Institute, Dr. Homi Bhabha, whether he would like to invite and accompany the Prime Minister to our laboratory. Dr. Bhabha said it would be nice if I sent an invitation to the Prime Minister. So I sent him a hand written note, as suggested.

On the day of his visit there was no formal reception or speeches. They entered the large dark room in which our cloud chamber was operating. We laid a couple of stools for them to sit right before the chamber and I started explaining what we were doing and why. And then Nehru asked what the project was about and what its outcomes would be.

It was my turn to talk a little about high energy interactions of cosmic rays; coming from the far reaches of our galaxy and beyond, they would occasionally collide with nuclei of our instruments, revealing the nature of their interaction in production of other fundamental particles. Some of these particles were new, and lived only for a short time, decaying in our instrument to reveal their properties. This charming set of events was shown to the two distinguished visitors through a couple of cloud chamber events.

Thanks to Nehru’s emphasis on self-reliance, it created a deep influence on the growth of science even in non-independent countries.Yash Pal is former Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University. The article is an edited excerpt from a speech he recently delivered at the 75th session of the Indian History Congress.)

NASA spacecraft clicks pictures of dwarf planet Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has delivered stunning images of Ceres, the dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt which lies between Mars and Jupiter.

“We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

New images show the dwarf planet at 27 pixels across, about three times better than the calibration images taken in early December.

The best images of Ceres so far were taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004.

This most recent images from Dawn, taken on January 13 at about 80 percent of Hubble resolution, were not quite as sharp.

Over the next several weeks, Dawn will deliver increasingly better and better images of the dwarf planet, leading up to the spacecraft’s capture into orbit around Ceres on March 6.

The images will continue to improve as the spacecraft spirals closer to the surface during its 16-month study of the dwarf planet.

“Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters,” said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany.

Dawn’s arrival at Ceres will mark the first time a spacecraft has ever visited a dwarf planet.

The spacecraft has already delivered more than 30,000 images and many insights about Vesta, the second most massive body in the asteroid belt.

DRDO gears up for maiden canister-based trial of Agni-V

Pre-mission activities were in full swing at Wheeler Island for the crucial test

India is all set to carry out the first canister-based trial of the 5,000 km-plus nuclear weapons capable Agni-V Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from the Wheeler Island, off the Odisha coast on January 31.

Pre-mission activities were in full swing at Wheeler Island for the crucial test when the missile would be fired in the “final induction configuration”, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) sources told The Hindu on Monday.

In view of the long range of the missile, the radars, telemetry and electro-optical tracking systems would be spread out and deployed in a way that there would be “repeatability” of data, the sources added.

High-end telemetry system

A sophisticated high-end telemetry system would be exercised for its full capacity to capture data.

After the successful trial of Agni-V for the second time in September, 2013, DRDO Director General and Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister Avinash Chander had then announced that the next launch would be canister-based.

First stage

As a prelude to the actual launch, DRDO missile technologists had in the past conducted ‘Missile Ejection Test’ from a canister in simulated conditions on two occasions when various parameters that would have to be met during the actual trial were validated.

The first stage of the three-stage solid fuelled Agni-V would be ignited at a height of 25-30 metres during the actual launch after a gas generator at the bottom of the canister provides force equivalent to 300-370 tonnes to push the missile to that height.

DRDO sources said the major advantage of canister was that it would provide operational flexibility to the user to launch the missile from anywhere as also easy and safer transportation.

The missile would be inducted after one or two more trials to test the robustness of the system.

A few tests would be enough for a large system, the sources added.

India joined an elite club of nations which possess ICBMs after the maiden launch of Agni-V ended in a roaring success on April 19, 2012.

Strengthening the people-centric US-India economic relationship

The economic relationship between the world's two most populous democracies in India and the US is quite appropriately perhaps the most people-centric between any two major nations. Indian nationals have in recent years accounted for roughly half of all employment-based US green cards and 40-50 per cent of high-skilled temporary L-1 andH-1B work visas. The depth of this relationship origins with very large gross domestic product/capita differentials and India's large globally competitive, English-speaking and geographically mobile services sector workforce. It, and potentially similar future links to other large economies, represents India's probably biggest opportunity to benefit from globalisation. Labour mobility and exchange of people will invariably be the key part of any future US-India economic relationship.

Regretfully, the economic importance of bilateral India-US labour flows is generally underappreciated by policymakers often unaware of its true magnitude. At least partly, this is due to the lack of data, and the inability of traditional trade and balance of payment methodologies to adequately capture the significance of these very 21st century economic linkages. Forthcoming research results to be published shortly by the Peterson Institute provide a fuller picture. A novel estimation methodology based on mandatory and thus comprehensive US work visa data, as opposed to often spotty services trade survey results, suggests that the true economic value of temporary bilateral labour migration by Indians working in the US already exceeds that of comparable goods and services exports from India to the US.

The estimated total Indian H-1B and L-1 high-skilled temporary work visa population employed in the US rose from about 400,000 in 2002 to about 600,000 by 2012. Using conservative assumptions concerning the prevailing US wages that these temporary Indian workers must be paid and sectoral company profit margins, my results show that the total economic value of this relationship rose from $25-30 billion annually from 2002-05 to $45-50 billion by 2008-12. In comparison, recorded US cross-border imports of private services from India, despite rising rapidly over the period, amounted to just $19 billion in 2012. And recorded US goods imports from India were at $41 billion in 2012, also lower than the estimate for the economic value of the temporary worker relationship from Indian workers in the US that year.

When properly measured, the exchange of people between India and the US, therefore, already matters more than traditional trade. And this is despite ongoing legal obstructionism and politically motivated barriers to temporary workflows in the US. Imagine what the temporary high-skilled labour flows could become, if the two governments could negotiate a new economic governance framework for temporary migration and the establishment of genuine brain chains. The potential gains would, with certainty, exceed those from any conceivable traditional bilateral free trade agreement.

An important implication of the much higher true scope of the existing economic importance of temporary high-skilled Indian migration to the US is that it forces the issue of an India-US so-called totalisation agreement on to the political agenda.

A totalisation agreement generally serves two purposes. First, it eliminates dual social contributions/taxation, a situation that occurs when a worker from one country works temporarily in another country and is on the same earnings required to pay contributions to social security systems in two countries. Second, a totalisation agreement protects individual workers against pension benefit losses incurred from having divided their careers between two countries. Workers who have split their professional working life between two countries may fail to fully vest (for example, qualify for) their retirement, survivors or disability insurance benefits from one or both countries, as they may not have worked long enough to meet minimum eligibility requirements.

This unfortunate and unfair outcome is currently a certainty for Indians working on high-skilled visas in the US, as generally available US old-age pension benefits require 10 years of contributions for individuals to qualify. In other words, Indians temporarily working in the US on H-1B or L-1 visas, which have a maximum duration of six and seven years respectively, are today legally prevented from residing lawfully in the US for long enough to become eligible for the US social benefits they have contributed to.

Indian temporary high-skilled workers in the US pay a total of 7.65 per cent of their wages in old-age and health care taxes. Relying again on comprehensive US immigration data, this implies an approximate $3 billion in ultimately forfeited contributions paid annually by Indian workers to American social insurance in recent years. Compared to the roughly $150 million in corresponding annual social insurance contributions by temporary US workers in India, this yields an approximately $1-to-$20 mismatch.

Viewed in light of ongoing imbalances of this magnitude, and recalling that hundreds of thousands of individual high-skilled Indians working in the US are affected, the current lack of an India-US totalisation agreement becomes a policy emergency. Concluding an agreement will for sure be fraught with political obstacles, not least in the US, but its conclusion could be a cornerstone in a new and even deeper people-centric relationship between India and the US.

India’s Quest to Seek Synergy in Energy on The Heels Of Low Crude Prices

The dramatic plunge in the global crude oil price from a high of 111 dollars a barrel in June 2014 to its lowest level of 45 dollars on January 13 awhile, registering nearly 60 per cent tumble in a shot span of a few months was unprecedented in the more than half a century annals of the world’s much-feared commodity cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). With global economic recovery not gaining substantial momentum across the continents to ensure higher energy consumption even at reduced growth prospects, no one is sure as to how far the crude oil price will go down or how long it will take to balance demand-supply mismatch so that prices can regain lost or losing ground.

Energy experts recall that the diminution in OPEC’s omnipotence could be traced to 1985 when Britain’s North Sea and the US Alaskan oil flooded the global oil market, resulting in a shift from monopolistic to competitive pricing. But that period petered out in 2005 when escalating Chinese energy demand triggered off a temporary global oil paucity, letting OPEC’s price ‘discipline’ weapon to get redeployed to the detriment of oil-importing emerging economies such as ours. But in recent years particularly after the financial crisis of 2008 when the global economy in general and the advanced countries in particular suffered low or no growth, the world’s fossil fuel energy demand fell woefully short of supply. Add to that, the United States was able to succeed in the production of shale oil which has begun to play a key role when small and medium-sized producers in the US successfully thrashed out in 2009-10 as to how to apply to oil production the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that had already been spectacularly successful for natural gas. As a result, US oil production soared from about five million barrels a day (mb/d) in 2008 to 9.1 mb/d in December 2014. In sum, the reasons for the steep drop in crude prices owed itself to a host of favorable factors that covered among others, growing supply from non-OPEC countries, particularly the US, a halting recovery in global demand and Saudi Arabia’s resoluteness not to continue acting as OPEC’s and the world’s swing producer, particularly when the US production threatens to outrun the Kingdom’s substantial and substantive share in the global oil market. 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is of the view that “overall, lower oil prices due to supply shifts are good news for the global economy, obviously with major distribution effects between oil importers and oil exporters”. But with the share of oil consumption in GDP that determines the energy intensity being high at 7.5 per cent in heavily oil-importing countries such as India and Indonesia, against 5.4 per cent in China and 3.8 per cent in the United States, the authorities may have to keep an unrelenting vigil to avert the painful possibility of how the lower crude prices would work its way into retail inflation if the consumption of oil also goes up on a faster clip. Already, the pump prices of petrol and diesel in the country had fallen sharply.  While petrol prices are now Rs 12.27 per litre lower than August last, diesel prices were down Rs 8.46 a litre since October with another round of cuts expected in mid-January.  Lest the persistent fall would accelerate pent-up demand for non-renewable and import-intensive fuel like crude oil and its derivative products, the authorities are cautious in calibrating the requisite adjustment in whatever feasible manner they can under the new dispensation of decontrol of prices of petrol and diesel. That is partly the reason why the government effected hike in excise duty during November and December in two tranches in 2014 to mop up a huge Rs 10,000 crore in the remaining part of the current fiscal in a bid to shore up its revenue to meet the budget deficit without burdening the consumer but by making the oil marketing companies (OMCs) to take the tab.

 Ever since the decontrol of the prices of petrol first and diesel later, OMCs were given the elbow-room to adjust selling price of petrol and diesel on import parity cost to leave them with some leeway to help upstream (production) companies to invest more in exploration and production so that domestic supply of oil and natural gas could also gather traction. This is particularly important because persistently lower oil prices might reduce exploration and production spending and heighten risk for offshore oil companies. Energy analysts argue that if the government is able to keep in leash any abrupt upsurge in oil consumption close on the heels of its drastic price fall in the global market for the past several months by fostering diversified sources for energy, it can also build a strategic reserve for energy security in the event of future spike in crude prices which are likely given the geopolitical stark realities in West Asia and non-OPEC producers such as Russia. Already, the Government of India, through Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL) is setting up strategic crude oil reserves with storage capacity of 5.33 million tonnes at Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru and Padur. In order to bolster the strategic crude oil storage capacity, ISPRL through Engineers India Ltd, has prepared a detailed feasibility study for construction of additional 12.5 million tones of strategic crude oil storage in Phase II at Bikaner, Rajkot, Chandikhol and Padur.  Using the extant soft global crude prices, the construction of oil storage caverns need to be fast-tracked so that storage capacity is suffice for securing energy security. As they say the best time to fix the roof is when sun shines and so is the best time to build supply stocks is now and here when imported crude price is cruising downhill for a few more months.

Since the country had been spending precious foreign exchange of the massive order of 160 billion dollars annually on oil imports, the soft crude price now prevailing in the global market would enable India to save at least 50 billion dollars in a year, provided there is no massive import volume to cater to the insatiable appetite for oil by domestic users, individuals as well as industry. Alternatively, the authorities could broad-base recovery techniques in the existing oil wells of national oil companies such as ONGC, OIL and GAIL, both onshore and offshore, making ample use of the slack in the oilfield service companies (OFS) which must perforce have to renew contracts on their existing rigs at markedly lower rates.   This is also an opportune time for upstream oil companies to aggressively step up production of oil and gas. It is no wonder that Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Mr. Saurabh Chandra told a partnership summit under the umbrella of CII and the Ministry of External Affairs recently that the government is working on a renewed bid to promote exploration activities in the country’s oil and gas sector. He said in the last couple of months, the government has taken several steps to augment “activities in exploration including a reassessment of the hydrocarbon potentials in the country, putting in place a plan to survey all sedimentary basins at a cost of Rs 6000 crore and framing a transparent extension policy for the pre-NELP (New Exploration Licensing Policy) fields”.

Alongside, using the drastic cut in oil import bill due to the decline in crude oil prices, the country should seize the opportunity to step up generation of renewable energy as this promises to stem, if not stop the massive drain on foreign exchange reserves entailed in the import of oil, gas and coal. The current installed renewable capacity will need to go and grow manifold for the country to move to 15 per cent of energy by 2020. As the initial cost of funding these unconventional sources of energy such as solar, wind, water and biomass are quite expensive with their sale price for users pegged quite high, efforts need to be stepped up by the authorities of the Ministry of Non-Conventional & Renewable Sources of Energy to redouble the gains from this source of unpolluted energy for ecological balance and to keep India’s eco system undefiled by noxious fuels. The Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi’s ambition of building 100 smart cities cannot be easy in the absence of due focus on fostering alternative transportation fuel options that range from gas, ethanol, methanol to suitable electric power at a time when crude  oil prices are on the wane and offering immense possibilities to explore and exploit. With over 70 per cent of the consumption being diesel, the highly-polluting and costly fuel, by the transportation sector mostly heavy duty trucks crisscrossing the country, it is time India plumped for introducing more and more flexi-fuel vehicles that are run on a medley of compressed natural gas, diesel, ethanol, petrol and methanol.     

For home consumption of electricity too, the time has come to go in for conserving precious power by opting for LED bulbs with the Prime Minister Mr. Modi recently launching a scheme for LED bulb distribution under Domestic Efficient Lighting Programme (DELP) and a National Programme for LED-based Home and Street Lighting. The country needs more such initiatives to solve Its myriad energy needs capitalizing on the recent bonanza being bestowed upon us by the fortuitous fall in the global crude prices, energy experts assert.  There is synergy in energy if only we use innovation and ingenuity.

IMF expects India to grow faster than China by 2016-17

Pegs India's growth at 6.5% in 2016-17, higher than China's 6.3%

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slightly cut projections for India's economic growth to 6.3% for 2015-16 against 6.4% made in October last year, while retaining the forecast for the current financial year at 5.6%.

In its World Economic Outlook Update, IMF pegged the country's growth rate at 6.5% for 2016-17.

On a different growth parameter, it projected India'seconomy to grow faster than China's by 2016-17. This methodology includes indirect taxes in gross domestic product and is called GDP at market prices.

On this methodology, India would grow at 6.5% in 2016-17 and China by 6.3% in 2016. However, time period is not strictly comparable as China's growth is for a calendar year and India's for a financial year (April-March).

Nonetheless, if India's economy does expand this way, it is no less an achievement since India's economy grew 5% (GDP at market prices) in 2013-14 against China's 7.8% during 2013. This gap is projected to narrow as India's economy is expected to expand 5.8% in the current financial year compared to 7.4% for China in 2014. For the next financial year, India is forecast to expand 6.3% against China's 6.8% for 2015.

While India's economy was projected to grow at higher rate each year compared to the previous one, China's economy was forecast to grow at less pace.

China's 2015 growth was projected to grow by 0.3 percentage points, less than what was pegged in October by the IMF. The growth for 2016 was expected to slow by 0.5 percentage points. On the other hand, India's growth was slashed by 0.1 percentage points for 2015-16 and retained for 2016-17.

The fund attributed this to decline in investment growth in China in the third quarter of 2014. 

"... leading indicators point to a further slowdown," it said.

The authorities are now expected to put greater weight on reducing vulnerabilities from recent rapid credit and investment growth and hence the forecast assumes less of a policy response to the underlying moderation.

However, IMF said the growth forecast is broadly unchanged for India. It said weaker external demand will be offset by lower oil prices and a pickup in industrial and investment activity after policy reforms.

Though the World Bank had also estimated India to grow at 7% by 2017-18 and China by 6.9% in 2017, the two growth rates were not comparable. This was because China's growth was computed on the basis of GDP at market prices and India's at GDP at factor cost (which excludes indirect taxes).

Officially, India estimates its economic growth in terms of GDP at factor cost. Under this methodology, both IMF and the World Bank forecast India's economy to grow by 5.6% in the current financial year. For the next financial year, the World Bank's forecast is 6.4% and that of IMF at 6.3%. For 2016-17, IMF predicted India's growth at 6.5%, 0.5 percentage points lower than the World Bank.

IMF predicted the world economic growth at 3.5% in 2015 and 3.7% the next year. Each of the growth rates was lower by 0.3 percentage points than its October forecast.

US was projected to grow 3.6% in 2015 and 3.3% the next year, higher by 0.5 percentage points and 0.3 percentage points compared to the October projections. The US economy was forecast to grow 2.4% in the just concluded year. US is the largest importers of India's goods.

Eurozone, which is the largest destination of India's merchandise exports, was projected to expand 1.2% in 2015 and 1.4% next year, 0.2 percentage points and 0.3 percentage points slower than what was predicted by the fund in October. It should be noted that the euro zone economy contracted 0.5% in 2013 and was projected to recover to 0.8% growth in 2014.

IMF said lower oil prices due to supply shifts boost global growth, although with important differences between oil importers and exporters. 

"The global economic impact depends crucially on how large and persistent the oil supply shifts are expected to be. The more persistent they are, the more consumers and firms will adjust consumption and production," it said.