Economy: India to drive a fifth of global growth in the next decade, says Kant
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: India is set to drive around 20 percent of the global economic growth in the next decade as it relentlessly marches to become the world’s third-largest economy, G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said on Thursday.
Addressing the All-India Management Association (AIMA) convention in the national capital, he said the South Asian country is currently the fifth-largest and the fastest-growing economy worldwide.
“In the next three years, we will overtake Japan and Germany to become the third-largest economy in the world. In a world starving for growth, India is an outlier and has emerged as a very resilient powerhouse driving growth,” he observed.
India will be driving a fifth, or 20 percent, of the world’s economic growth in the next decade, he added.
“What we are witnessing today is a once-in-a-generation shift in our economic position. Just a few years back, we were in the fragile five, and from the fragile five, we moved to the top five in a decade,” Kant said.
The former bureaucrat said India needs to transform the lives of people living in rural areas, improve health outcomes, and enhance nutritional standards to become a developed nation by 2047.
The country needs several champion states to drive future growth, Kant said.
“If India is to grow at 9-10 percent over the next three decades and become a developed economy by 2047, we need to improve our learning outcomes, health outcomes, and nutritional standards in a very big way,” he added.
This means that states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, which account for almost 50 percent of the country’s population, need to be transformed, Kant said.
“We must transform them to make them the key driver of improvement on the human development index,” Kant said.
The top 50 percent of India’s population creates growth and drives prosperity. And the bottom 50 percent lives mainly in rural areas, relying on agriculture wage labor or government welfare schemes to achieve basic living standards, he added.
“It is important that we transform the lives of these people to the bottom 50 percent.”
