MUMBAI: Indian shares settled lower on Wednesday, dragged by pharma and technology stocks, while data showed that the country’s economic growth slowed to the lowest in a year during the March quarter. After see-sawing between gains and losses for most of the session, the NSE Nifty 50 index ended 0.37 percent lower at 16,522.75 and the S&P BSE Sensex finished down 0.33 percent at 55,381.17. Record renewables output Record green energy output reduced Indian dependence on coal in May, despite a 23.5 percent growth in power demand, contributing to a rise in utilities’ coal inventories, a Reuters analysis of the official data showed. Surging supply from renewables will go some way toward mitigating India’s coal shortage amid extraordinarily rapid growth in demand, which has forced the country to reopen mines and return to importing the fuel. The share of renewable energy sources in power output rose to 14.1 percent in May from 10.2 percent in April. Coal made room for it, dropping to 72.4 percent of Indian generation from 76.8 percent. Coal’s share was still higher than its 70.9 percent in May 2021, however. Power shortages, driven entirely by demand, not fall in supply, narrowed to 0.4 percent of requirements in May. This compared with 1.8 percent in April, an analysis of daily load dispatch data from federal grid regulator POSOCO showed. Demand in the financial year to March 2023 is expected to grow at the fastest pace in at least 38 years. Utilities’ coal inventories at the end of April were at their lowest levels in years, but they rose 6.3 percent in May to 23.3 million tons, helped by renewables stepping up to carry more of the national electricity load. Economic growth slows down India’s economic growth slowed to the lowest in a year in the first three months of 2022, hit by weakening consumer demand amid soaring prices that could make the central bank’s task of taming inflation without harming growth more difficult. Gross domestic product grew 4.1 percent year-on-year in January-March, government data released on Tuesday showed, in line with a 4 percent forecast by economists in a Reuters poll, and below 5.4 percent growth in October-December and growth of 8.4 percent in July-September. The economy’s near-term prospects have darkened due to a spike in retail inflation, which hit an eight-year high of 7.8 percent in April. The surge in energy and commodity prices caused partly by the Ukraine crisis is also squeezing economic activity.