New Delhi: India’s industrial production growth remains almost flat at 3 per cent in March sequentially, though, on a year-on-year basis, it slipped from 5.5 per cent, mainly due to poor performance of the manufacturing, mining and power sectors.
The government also revised the industrial growth figure downward to 2.7 per cent for February 2025 from the provisional estimate of 2.9 per cent earlier this month, according to the official data released on Monday.
In the fiscal 2024-25, the IIP decelerated to a four-year low of 4 per cent. It was 5.9 per cent in 2023-24 and the previous low was recorded at -8.4 per cent in 2020-21.
The growth was 11.4 per cent in 2021-22 and 5.2 per cent in 2022-23.
The factory output, measured in terms of the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), rose by 5.5 per cent in March 2024, as per the data.
The data released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) also showed that the manufacturing sector’s output growth slightly decelerated to 3 per cent in March 2025 from 5.9 per cent in the year-ago month.
Mining production dipped to 0.4 per cent from 1.3 per cent growth a year ago.
Power output also slowed to 6.3 per cent in March 2025 against 8.6 per cent in the year-ago period.
Aditi Nayar, Chief Economist & Head – Research & Outreach, Icra, said, “In sequential terms, the improvement in YoY (year-on-year) growth of electricity and mild uptick in that of manufacturing was offset to a large extent by the dip in the growth of mining”.
“Looking ahead, while there is some evidence and commentary around frontloading in exports to the US, we need to see whether this is driven by redirection away from other geographies or a bump up in output in the ongoing month”.
As per use-based classification, the capital goods segment growth decelerated to 2.4 per cent in March 2025 against 7 per cent in the year-ago period.
Consumer durables (or white goods production) grew 6.6 per cent during the reporting month against a growth of 9.5 per cent in March 2024.
In March 2025, consumer non-durables output contracted 4.7 per cent compared to a growth of 5.2 per cent a year ago.
According to the data, infrastructure/construction goods reported a growth of 8.8 per cent in March 2025, down from a 7.4 per cent expansion in the year-ago period.
The data also showed that the output of primary goods logged a 3.1 per cent growth in March 2025 against 3 per cent a year earlier.
The expansion in the intermediate goods segment was 2.3 per cent in the month under review, down from 6.1 per cent a year ago.
Now onwards, the IIP data will be released on the 28th of every month as the NSO has advanced the release of the macroeconomic data by two weeks.
This is the first time the IIP data was released on the 28th.
Earlier, the IIP was released after a gap of six weeks on every 12th of a month. Now it will be released after a four-week lag.
(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ’s editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
