The Ministry of Finance on Wednesday said that economic activities remained resilient during the third wave of Covid-19 in India and that the country has learnt to move on with “virus-based constraints”.

The observations were made in the finance ministry’s Monthly Economic Review report for January.

The ministry said that the economic impact of the third wave of Covid-19 has been much weaker than the previous two waves. The Omicron strain of coronavirus, which was first found in South Africa in November, has driven the third wave of the pandemic in India since December.

In Wednesday’s report, the ministry said that the Indian economy was set to grow above 9% as projected in the country’s Economic Survey for the current fiscal year.

The report also noted that while the International Monetary Fund had lowered its global growth estimate for the year 2022, the economic body has said that India was so far the only large and major country whose growth projections were revised upwards for the financial year 2022-’23.

In its World Economic Outlook report released in January, the International Monetary Fund had projected the global economy to grow by 4.4% this year, down by 0.5 percentage points from its October’s forecast.

“In a testimony to the resilience of its people and the farsightedness of its policy making, the Indian economy that contracted by (-)6.6% in 2020-’21, is now projected in 2022-23 to grow the quickest among the league of large nations,” the report said.

In the report, the ministry also said that manufacturing and construction sectors would be the “growth drivers” for India’s economy.

“Distance enabled or remote services will be on the rise to the extent they substitute for contact-based services made dysfunctional with repeated waves of the pandemic,” the ministry said in the report.