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Striving for a seven to eight per cent growth rate in the next five years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said his government's policy of having the consent of the widest possible section of the population on reforms would produce more durable results.

"It is my ambition and it's our expectation that in the next five years, we should be able to raise the growth rate to at least seven to eight per cent" from the annual average rate of over six per cent in the last 10 to 12 years, Singh said in an interview in New York to PBS.

Asked whether India would emerge as the world's strongest economy, the 71-year old architect of the country's economic reforms, said: "I am not an astrologer. I think people who believe in forecasting the future, in the famous words of Dante, are probably condemned to hell. "But I have every reason to believe that the Indian economy will grow at a much faster rate in the years to come than it has grown in the past," the prime minister said.

Singh said unlike many other countries, the proportion of people of working age was going to increase sharply in India in the coming years.

"All demographers tell me that the increase in the proportion of the people in the working age to the total population will increase the saving potential of our economy very considerably. We will have a relatively younger population, and that will create new opportunities for expanding the scope for productive investments in the country."

The prime minister said the Indian economy was now much more open to new ideas, to new competition, internal and external.

"So, I have every reason to believe that the 21st century may well be the Asian century." -- PTI

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Photo: Paresh Gandhi