Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee expects the economy to expand by a healthy 7.5 per cent this fiscal driven mainly by a sharp rise in industrial output, which jumped by 16.8 per cent in December as compared to a decline of 0.2 per cent a year ago. <br/><br/>Addressing a seminar in the capital, he said, the IIP figures for the month of December 2009 suggest a growth rate of 7.5 per cent and next year it could be over 8 per cent. <br/><br/>The Finance Ministry, in the Mid-Term Review of the economy tabled in Parliament in December, had said that economic growth during the current fiscal could exceed 7.75 per cent. <br/><br/>However, the Central Statistical Organisation, which estimates the national income, recently pegged economic expansion at 7.2 per cent for the current fiscal. <br/><br/>Hit by global financial crisis, India's GDP growth rate slipped from over 9 per cent in the three till 2007-08 to 6.7 per cent during 2008-09. Mr Mukherjee said, the government has put in place a carefully designed stimulus package to cushion the economy from the impact of the slowdown and this enabled the country to weather the crisis better than many other countries. <br/><br/>The fiscal stimulus amounted to 3.5 per cent of the GDP totalling 1.86 lakh crore rupees, he said, adding the tax concessions to the industry worked out to be 42,000 crore rupees.<br/><br/>The stimulus, however, is expected to push the fiscal deficit to 6.8 per cent of the GDP during 2009-10 from 6.2 per cent a year ago. Rising fiscal deficit is one important issue which Mukherjee would have to focus on in the budget for 2010-11 to be unveiled in the Lok Sabha on February 26.