Sunday 16 / June / 2024
New Delhi: In the sprawling ballroom of Taj Bengal hotel in eastern city Kolkata, eager beaver listeners who filled the venue to the capacity were all ears as India's hard-nosed external affairs minister S Jaishankar spoke on a sultry afternoon this May.
The audience broke into cheering as Jaishankar highlighted the roadmap of creating India a strong USD 30 trillion economy by 2047, a cherished dream of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Sounding ballistic, Jaishankar said the 1.4 billion people of India can wear on their sleeves the pride of being called citizens of a developed country with the revival of the manufacturing sector.
With Indians casting their ballots in a staggered seven-phase election to choose a new Parliament, the incumbent government, led by PM Narendra Modi, has set a vision not for the next five years but till 2047 with an aim to touch the country's GDP growth to a whopping USD 30 trillion economy.
This was voiced by two key leaders of the Modi-led government in recent months.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently emphasised while addressing the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit that India will become a 30 trillion dollar economy by 2047.
She even said the country will become a 5 trillion dollar economy by 2028.
Interestingly, if the economic growth as predicted by the Minister turns out to be true then it will take place during the tenure of the new government in which the country is voting to power at present.
PM Narendra Modi and his government are eyeing to return for the record-equalling third straight term, a rare instance in Indian politics which has so far seen the Congress returning to power for the longest period of time.
Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar echoed the finance minister when he voiced a similar growth trajectory for the country while attending an event in Kolkata. "Our immediate step is to become a USD 5 trillion economy," he said.
"Our next target will be to see when we can become a USD 30 trillion economy in our Viksit Bharat journey," he added.
Jaishankar pushed the goal of touching 'Viksit Bharat' (developed India) by 2047, as envisioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and urged business associations to partner with the government to ensure the revival of the country's manufacturing sector with the target to fuel the country’s GDP growth.
Not only politicians, but even top financial institutions also predict a similar uptick in India's economic progress in the coming years.
India's executive director at International Monetary Fund (IMF) Krishnamurthy Venkata Subramanian has said the country's economy can grow at 8 per cent or more till 2047.
"So, the basic idea is that with the kind of growth that India has registered in the last 10 years, if we can redouble the good policies that we have implemented over the last 10 years and accelerate the reforms, then India can grow at 8 per cent from here on till 2047," he said at the Times Now Summit, highlighting the way the target could be achieved.
In its report released in 2024, the World Bank said India's output growth is expected to reach 7.5 percent in FY23/24.
The data revealed by the financial institutes surely pads up to the ambition of the Indian government and its leaders.
Notably, Jaishankar quoted these institutes when he said: " Several studies have expressed confidence that we can certainly do it by 2047 or even earlier."
The optimism is all pervasive. As India's leading industrialist Gautam Adani puts it: "While economic cycles are getting increasingly hard to forecast, there is little doubt that India, the world’s fifth largest economy, will become the world’s third largest economy well before 2030 and the second largest by 2050."
He said the nation’s demographic dividend is expected to drive consumption and accelerate the growth of a tax paying society at a record pace.
"The United Nations Population Fund projects that India’s median age will be just 38 years even in 2050. Over this period, India’s population is expected to grow by approximately 15% to 1.6 billion, but the per capita income will accelerate by over 700% to about $16,000. On a purchasing power parity basis, this per capita metric will be 3 to 4 times higher," he said.
"Following independence, it took us 58 years to get to our first trillion dollars of GDP, 12 years to get to the next trillion and just 5 years for the third trillion. I anticipate that within the next decade, India will start adding a trillion dollars to its GDP every 18 months. This puts us on track to be a $25-$30 trillion economy by 2050 and drive India’s stock market capitalization to over $40 trillion," he said echoing the sentiments of India's business community.
