It is important for India to stay the course on fiscal consolidation. The aggregate deficit for India -- both centre and state deficits -- has not improved much in the last five years,, Chief Economist,, said inin an exclusive interview with ET Now at Davos.Edited excerpts:Global growth has weakened and we have revised it down but to be clear, the revisions are quite modest. It is only 0.2 percentage points for 2019 and 0.1 for 2020. That said, we do see that the risks of a much shaper downward correction are rising. Some of the big ones with respect to the trade tensions and the financial sector.The US is growing at a very healthy rate. It is still at a cyclical high. But because we anticipate the stimulus from the fiscal side to weaken this year and next, it was already in our October forecasts in 2018 that the US economy would slow. I mean that was expected. Job creation in the US is very high. Consumer confidence is very high. The risks for the US will be on the trade side, about whether there will be a greater disruption and the reason that has become a major issue for the US is because we are now seeing financial sentiments and trade tensions getting intertwined and the financial sentiment can make things more disruptive for the US.We are working with a scenario where the UK continues to be in a free trade and that is what is in our forecasts and the transition is relatively smooth. In the event of a no-deal Brexit and reverse to WTO rules, the costs are going to be much larger. At this point, the situation can be best described as a large amount of uncertainty on both sides because while there is a possibility of no-deal Brexit, there is also the possibility of reversal of Brexit. In either case, a very high level of uncertainty weighs negatively on investment, something we have already seen for UK.This was in our forecasts from last October that the Chinese economy would grow at 6.6% in 2018 and then slow down somewhat in 2019 and 2020. That is very consistent with the mature stage of the Chinese economy and that is consistent with China rebalancing away from industries towards services. So, that is not the news over there. The news would have been if there was a much bigger correction but we have not seen that.The risks do remain and it depends a lot on what happens with the trade discussions that is an important factor. But at this point, we do not know where that will end.India remains one of the fastest growing large economies of the world and it is one of the few countries for which our estimates actually point to increase in growth rate for 2019. There are two reasons why we expect the growth to go up. One is because of the declining commodity prices which helps India and which also makes it easier for RBI to have a fairly neutral or accommodative monetary policy. Both these get factored into a higher forecast for India.There are a few accomplishments of this government. Goods and services tax (GST), bankruptcy reform and setting up of inflation targeting framework are very important ones. We have seen an improvement in the ease of doing business. Those were all good measures that were taken by this government.These are two sectors where we continue to need to do a better job -- both on the agricultural side and on creating jobs. There cannot be quick fixes like loan waivers. The state-sponsored skilling programmes have not worked that well and maybe we need to have it done more with the private sector in terms of firms providing in-house training to workers. That would be a better alternative.On the agricultural side, there is obviously a lot of distress on the farmers and a more cash transfer based approach rather than farm loan waivers or input subsidies would be better.It is important for India to stay the course on fiscal consolidation. If you look at the aggregate deficit for India -- combining the centre and the state deficits -- has not improved much in the last five years. That is something that needs to be addressed. This is of course a election year but it is very important that India pays very close attention to the deficit and stays within target.