Govt likely to announce spending cuts on Saturday

The government could announce spending cuts for the 2013 fiscal year on Saturday, although the size of the cuts was not immediately clear, two government sources said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will chair a meeting of top government economists to discuss India's five-year economic strategy and look at trimming expenditure in the light of an economic slowdown.

"The government is quite serious to keep the fiscal deficit as close to budgeted target of 5.1% of GDP as possible," one of the sources, a senior finance ministry source said.

A second source, a senior government official who did not want to be named, said the meeting would "discuss cuts for current spending".