Some of India's top business leaders recently told CNBCÂ that they were not too pessimistic about the country's growth prospects in the coming years, despite a recent prediction downgrade from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF marked down India's growth projection for 2020 by 1.2 percentage points from its October forecast — for 2020, the organization expects Asia's third-largest economy to grow by 5.8% before jumping up to 6.5% in 2021, ahead of China.
Last year, India's economic output slowed to 4.5% in the three months that ended in September, marking the slowest pace of expansion in six years.
"There's a concern, definitely. I won't say that there is no concern because the growth has dropped sharply, and there may be a couple of reasons," Rajnish Kumar, chairman of the State Bank of India — the country's largest public lender — told CNBC's Karen Tso at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"In the last five years, there has been a big reform agenda, which the government has carried out. When we're transitioning to a new phase, new way of doing business, I think this is the pain we're going through," Kumar said.
Anand Mahindra, CEO of multinational conglomerate Mahindra Group, pointed to the IMF's 2021 projection for the country.
"India will be 6.5%, ahead of China's 5.8%, which will make us once again the fastest-growing (major) economy in the world," he told CNBC's Karen Tso. "I guess it's one of those cases of 'Is the glass half-full or half-empty?' Everybody's looking at the bad news, and I think that's become a default thing."
Meanwhile, Salil Parekh, who runs Infosys, which provides information technology and outsourcing services to foreign firms, told CNBC's Geoff Cutmore and Steve Sedgwick that since most of his business is outside India, the slowdown hasn't had any material impact on operations. But many of his employees have been affected.
"I know the government, the prime minister, and everyone in the business community are working towards putting in measures that are going to bring the growth back. My sense is in the next few quarters, we'll start to see that," Parekh said.
In a bid to ignite the economy, India slashed its corporate tax rate last year.
During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first term in charge, his government undertook two major policy reforms: demonetization and the introduction of a new goods and services tax scheme. Measures were also undertaken to reform India's bankruptcy laws while the central bank made efforts to clean up the country's debt-laden public banks.
Some of those measures left many small-and-medium-sized businesses reeling. Insufficient job creation, weakness in corporate earnings and profits, low levels of private investments, and a crisis in the financial sector took some steam out of the economy and growth slowed.
Experts have said recent indicators, including industrial production figures, factory activity data, auto sales, and bank credit, point to a gradual reversal in the slowdown.
India's finance minister is due to present the country's union budget on Feb. 1 for the fiscal year that begins on Apr. 1 and ends on Mar. 31, 2021. Economists expect the government to announce spending measures to boost demand, despite a probable widening of the fiscal deficit.
