Passage Based Questions: Logical Reasoning - 2 | Passage Based Questions for CLAT Preparation PDF Download

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions.
The Reserve Bank of India has downgraded its forecast for growth in the current fiscal year to 5%. But going by the gloom that pervades our analysts and commentators, one would be tempted to think that the forecast is missing a minus sign in front of it. At such a time, a look at the post-reform economic history of India provides a good reality check.
Since 1991, when systematic economic reforms were launched, the economy has oscillated between periods of high and low growth with the latter lasting two to three years. Each time it enters a low growth phase, sceptics and pessimists of different shades come to the fore, predicting the end of the India growth story. Each time, the economy proves them wrong .
Thus, alongside reforms, India had managed to register an average annual growth rate of 6.4% from 1992-93 to 1999-2000. This was the first time the country grew at a rate exceeding 6% for a continuous eight-year period. Even the 1997-98 East Asian currency crisis could halt the economy during this period for only a year. It quickly bounced back to grow 7.5% on average in the following two years.
Though there was no discontinuity in policy in the new millennium, average annual growth plummeted to 4.1% during 2000-01 to 2002-03. An avalanche of gloomy pronouncements followed not just in the media but academia as well. While economist Bradford DeLong wrote sceptically of India’s reforms, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramaniam upped the ante by arguing that the post-1991 reforms had delivered nothing. The economy had grown no faster in the 1990s than in the 1980s, they claimed.
But the celebrations of reform critics did not last long. Sustained policy reform by Prime Ministers Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee yielded handsome returns. During the last year of Vajpayee government, the economy grew 7.9%. In the following years, it accelerated, growing at the average annual rate of 8.2% for a continuous nine-year period from 2003-04 to 2011-12. Even the massive global financial crisis could jolt the economy only for a year with growth returning to 8.5% on average during 2009-10 to 2011-12.