Mr Pramod Chaudhuri, Chairman, Praj Industries: Rising inflation could lead to recession and even worse, ‘stagflation’.

Mr Seshagiri Rao, Director (Finance), JSW Steel Ltd: The immediate concern of industry is availability of capital. In the current scenario, interest rates are bound to go up and the growth in credit curtailed.

Mr Sonjoy Anand, Chief Financial Officer, Tech Mahindra: For IT companies , high inflation will not impact the demand size of business, as a majority of firms generate revenues from software exports to overseas clients. It will put additional pressure on cost heads related to infrastructure, travel, people and communication. We expect our travel expenses to increase.

Mr J K Gupta, CFO, CMC: Inflation can have some negative impact on growth momentum. From a client perspective, it could result in inflated wage bills and also impact the availability of surplus money (for discretionary expenses) for them.

Since, majority domestic IT clients consider a major portion of their IT budgets to be discretionary in nature, they will have a tendency to postpone some of their investments in IT.

As clients might cut back on budgets, the demand environment for companies like ours will be impacted. Most companies will have to go slow on their capex investments . .

Mr Surendra Hiranandani, Managing Director, Hiranandani Group: Double-digit inflation is not unique to India and has hit all the countries in the region, but India is better positioned to ride over this temporary phenomenon. The Government needs to expedite the reform process to sustain growth. There are too many hurdles to business, whether in infrastructure or real estate. Procedures have to be simplified and approvals expedited. Interest rates are bound to increase in the near term and this is something everybody has to live with .

Mr Akhil Gupta, Joint Managing Director, Bharti Enterprises: Double-digit inflation is a temporary phase and in the long run it should settle at 8 per cent.

Mr Pramod Bhasin, Genpact President and CEO: The high numbers will make companies more conscious about efficiency and belt tightening measures in terms of what to do about pricing. We are more worried about the impact on our customers and how they will behave.

Mr Ajay S. Shriram, Chairman and Managing Director, DCM Shriram Consolidated Ltd: Input costs have gone up by 25-30 per cent in the last two years. Fortunately there is still over 8 per cent GDP growth and people are still spending money and the economy is growing. Efforts to increase agricultural productivity seem to be the only solution. If the RBI raises repo rates or the CRR rates go up, certainly industrial investment will get impacted.

Mr A. Ramasubramanian, Chief Executive, Eicher Motors: What we are grappling with is the increase in steel prices which would impact vehicle prices . What the Government could have done earlier was stagger the price increase over the last four years so that all of a sudden the inflation would not have gone so high.However, as of now there is no sign of recession. There could be relatively lower growth.

Mr B. Hariharan, CFO, Ballarpur Industries Ltd: Growth in the manufacturing sector will come down and the GDP would not be able to sustain the eight per cent growth rate. Interest rates will harden and the availability of domestic funds will come down drastically. Liquidity is also likely to get affected.

The measures that the Government has taken now should have come a little earlier. As far as BILT is concerned, we have closed all capex till 2009 and would not be making any fresh borrowings.

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