Month: August 2025

India’s growth dream rests more on political spin and statistical sleight-of-hand than on real economic fundamentals.

“Swami Vivekananda often invoked a Katha Upanishad aphorism: “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.” India’s policymakers and media would do well to heed this call. Continued speculations about India’s superpower status mislead and distract. The evidence paints a sobering picture of the economy. This lesson is not that investors are fickle, or policy tinkering will do the trick; it is about fundamentals India refuses to fix. Persistent structural deficiencies—rooted in weak human capital and poor job creation—have kept India from achieving shared and sustainable growth.”

“It is past time we stopped fixating on GDP growth. It measures economic welfare poorly. Nearly 60 years ago, in May 1968, then Senator Robert Kennedy memorably said: “Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage…. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning… it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”.”

Sometimes a tiny number tells a big story. At $353 million in 2024-25, net foreign direct investment (FDI) is one such number. Defined as gross foreign investment inflow minus funds repatriated by foreigners and investments made abroad by Indian nationals, net FDI has plummeted to one-seventh of the previous lowest amount in the last quarter century ($2.4 billion in 2003-04). Seen from another perspective, net FDI in 2024-25 was less than one-hundredth its peak of $44 billion in 2020-21. The problem lies less with gross inflows, which fluctuate moderately but are shrouded in mystery as the island nation of Mauritius (population 1.3 million) remains India’s top foreign investor—astonishingly supplying 25 per cent of all inflows. The troubling action centers on the outflows—and here there is no mystery. Both foreign investors in India and Indians are moving money abroad, leaving behind shrinking net inflows. In 2024-25, foreigners repatriated $52 billion, and Indians invested $29 billion overseas, together totaling to about twice the outflow recorded two years earlier.

This gush of funds out of India warrants soul-searching. We keep hearing that India is poised to replace China as the next manufacturing giant. Learned voices speak earnestly of Viksit Bharat, an advanced Indian economy by 2047. Why then is money exiting India? The Reserve Bank of India’s commentary is either cynical or illiterate. The exodus of funds, the RBI claims, signifies “a mature market where foreign investors can enter and exit smoothly”, and therefore “reflects positively on the Indian economy”. This is nonsense.

The RBI seems to have missed an entire economics literature on the Lucas paradox, named after the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas. His proposition was straightforward. India is a poor country, with a vast pool of surplus labor that supplies its services at pitifully low wages. Returns on investment in India are, therefore, potentially much larger than in mature, wealthy economies. In fact, the difference in returns on capital is possibly so large that we should see “no investment in wealthy countries”, Lucas wrote. Stated more starkly, all the world’s investment should occur in poor countries such as India.

Of course, this logic does not work in practice: the vast bulk of global investment occurs in rich countries. This gap between logic and practice—the Lucas paradox—invites us to examine weaknesses that prevent poor economies from taking advantage of their low wages.

India faces a redoubled Lucas paradox because it is, allegedly, poised for greatness. Indian and international elites, including such eminences as Jeff Bezos, indulge in happy talk about an imminent Indian decade—even an Indian century as a new superpower. If so, capital should be pouring into India, not fleeing the country, as if abandoning a sinking ship.

The rose-tinted speculations about India have two much-hyped sources. The most tantalizing is the so-called “China-plus-one” phenomenon (the possibility that companies might avoid manufacturing solely in China and instead diversify to other low-wage economies like India). The buzz began during US President Donald Trump’s first term when, in the second-half of 2018, he imposed tariffs on Chinese exports to the US; the expectation was that foreign investors would flock to India and establish a new global manufacturing hub. To reinforce this anticipated surge, the Indian government launched its Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes in March 2020. The goal of these schemes was to raise the share of manufacturing in Indian GDP from 14 per cent to 25 per cent.

Reinforcing the China-plus-one theme has been the drumbeat of India as the fastest growing among the world’s major economies. How do we reconcile the tale of India as a rapidly emerging “ economic superpower” with the exodus of capital? To unpack this contradiction, we must confront questions that are too often taboo. Is India fundamentally constrained in fostering productive manufacturing, particularly for exports, and therefore incapable of taking advantage of global opportunities? Is India’s “rapid GDP growth” a fiction, built on misreading the data and an aversion to engaging with the economy’s underlying rigidities? Honest answers to these questions could reshape how we understand the country’s economic future, its global standing, and what we can do about it.

The China-plus-one illusion

For over seven decades, India has struggled to gain a foothold in international manufactured exports. The unchanging cause of this struggle has been low productivity, rooted in its persistent human capital deficit. And low productivity has consistently offset any potential advantage from low wages. The unflattering premise of the China-plus-one hope is that it may be impossible to raise Indian productivity sufficiently. Hence, large tariffs on China’s exports are the only way to propel India forward. Only then can India attract foreign capital, expand global exports, and generate desperately needed low-skilled jobs.

But such narrow-minded thinking dodges history’s lesson: only a long-term productivity-enhancing strategy can prepare a country for grabbing such opportunities and lead to lasting success. Ask the obvious question: Why did India lose the race for the exports of labor-intensive manufactured goods to Japan in the 1950s, to Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, to China in the 1980s and 1990s, and to Vietnam after the turn of the new millennium. It is no surprise that Vietnam has been the principal beneficiary of the China-plus-one opening. Like all the other East Asian countries that raced ahead of India, Vietnam has relied on two bedrock strengths that India perennially fails in establishing: mass education and high female labor force participation.

Widespread education, which meets minimum international benchmarks of literacy, and high female labor force participation generate a virtuous cycle of human capital development, as the Brown University economist Oded Galor has emphasized. When women work, they place greater value on their children’s health and education, the children grow up more productive, a more productive economy creates more opportunities for female workers, which further increases the incentives to educate children.

East Asia was no fluke; it was just a modern version of a process that all advanced industrialized nations, despite their differences in output composition and export orientation, went through. The self-reinforcing interaction between mass education, female labor force participation, and productivity growth has been the beating heart of economic progress since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. Without this virtuous dynamic, no country has achieved continuing and sustainable productivity gains.

The history is so overwhelming that even a free-market economist such as Lucas highlighted the lack of human capital as the critical impediment to investment flows from rich to poor nations. As he explained, although lower uncertainty and easier business conditions help attract investment, “policies focused on affecting the accumulation of human capital surely have a much larger potential”. Without adequate human capital, low-wage workers remain unproductive and unable to generate high returns on capital.

Bangladesh underscores this point. It succeeded as a garment exporter because a grassroots movement simultaneously promoted widespread education and female agency. However, the country did not diversify beyond garments because broader economic competitiveness was not possible without sustained investment in human capital.

And so Trump’s September 2018 tariffs on Chinese products offered India a seemingly golden opportunity. The hype grew quickly. In February 2019, a UN report predicted that India would be among the largest beneficiaries of the US-China trade war. India’s Commerce Ministry got in on the act, prodding exporters to take advantage of the opening. And as US tariffs on Chinese products increased under the Trump and Biden presidencies, the India hype became the new received wisdom. But it was never supported by data.

The China-plus-one opportunity had opened well before Trump’s tariffs and was already slipping away from Indian hands. China had started ceding its dominance in labor-intensive exports in the early 2010s, as an analysis by Harvard University’s Gordon Hanson shows. The shift was slow because Chinese producers moved some of their production from high-cost coastal areas to the lower-cost interior regions. Equally, China’s deep network of suppliers of components and materials was almost impossible to reproduce elsewhere. Vietnam made the most impressive progress in claiming ground that China ceded. In Europe, Poland gained. Mexico and other Latin American countries, helped by stepped-up Chinese investment, were other beneficiaries. India’s global share of labor-intensive products flattened around 2012 and then fell after 2016.

India shifted to non-labor-intensive exports through chemical and petrochemical products. Exports of refined petroleum products from India gained a big momentum after the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022. Once Western nations reduced their imports of Russian crude oil, India increased its imports of discounted Russian oil, processing it into refined products that Russia could not sell directly due to sanctions. Ironically, therefore, when US tariffs opened the China-plus-one window wider, India transitioned away from labor-intensive exports to extraordinarily capital-intensive exports that relied very little on the country’s pool of surplus labor. The PLIs barely moved the needle on exports and jobs, and in early 2025, the government let the scheme die.

In a notable exception though, India did attract subcontractors of Apple’s iPhones.

A bite of the Apple

Starting in May 2017, Apple’s subcontractors set up production facilities in southern Indian States. They employed female workers and housed them in dormitories close to the factories, much like in East Asia. Despite challenges, including continuing productivity lacunae, strikes for better working conditions, and worker attrition, the iPhone subcontractors have increased the numbers of workers they employ. And when Trump announced added tariffs on China in early 2025, Apple said it would speed up the expansion of iPhone production in India. As if on cue, and learning nothing from the recent past, the Indian business press repeated its mantra of six years ago: “US-China trade war to benefit Indian exporters.”

To be sure, the optimistic prognosis has a kernel of truth. In a research paper that the economist David Wheeler and I wrote, we found that past foreign investment is the best predictor of future such investment. The logic of this finding is that when foreign investors make sizeable commitments to a country, they signal that it offers a hospitable location; alongside, they attract (domestic and international) suppliers to meet their growing need for materials and other inputs. We called these spillover investments “agglomeration effects”. The Chinese east coast is the pre-eminent modern example of such agglomerations or clusters. The critical question is not whether Apple will source more phones from India (which is still an open question) but whether iPhone-related production will attract new investors, in electronics and other product lines.

Again, the history is not kind. Agglomerations have not bloomed in India. Quite simply, foreigners and Indians would not be taking their capital out at this moment if agglomeration economies were present. Also, seeds sown in the past have failed to sprout. Manufacturing employs just 16 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s workforce, an unimpressive figure only modestly above the all-India share of 11.5 per cent. The cell phone manufacturer Nokia had a major facility in Tamil Nadu, but even before it wound up, it generated little complementary employment. Similarly, Tamil Nadu’s automotive industry, although admirable by Indian standards, has survived largely because high tariffs have protected it from international competition. Tamil Nadu (and Indian) auto producers are minnows in the global market; they have not generated any notable upsurge in the mechanical or electrical industry. Among Apple’s subcontractors, Foxconn’s proposed investment in semiconductors has fizzled out.

In comparison with its Indian plans, the size and longevity of Apple’s commitment to China was several orders of magnitude greater, as the journalist and author Patrick McGee has noted in his recent book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Apple nurtured an extraordinary Chinese ecosystem of suppliers with incredibly large capital investments and hands-on training by its California-based engineers. These investments paid off handsomely because they leveraged a deep pool of Chinese human capital, which India does not come close to possessing.

An expert dismissively said to McGee that iPhones were assembled in China, disassembled, and then reassembled in India. Of course, this is likely an overstatement and, in any case, there is no shame in starting with basic assembly operations. The million-dollar question though is, can India build on that start? The limits are evident: high dependence on Chinese machinery and experts is an impediment to Indian growth (not just in smartphone manufacturing but even in labor-intensive industries such as footwear).

McGee also warns that Apple may be old news. Chinese suppliers fostered by Apple have themselves become world-class smartphone producers. Their global market share has outpaced Apple’s, and they could become globally dominant if Chinese operating systems become international industry standards. While Apple will likely not be a Nokia-style casualty of global technological trends, it is sliding towards a second-tier status. India’s bite at this Apple may have come too late.

And amid the long-relished hoopla of Trump’s tariffs giving India a new edge, the news as we go to press is unfavorable to India: India might face higher tariffs than other countries seeking the China-plus-one advantage. The question, of course, remains where and when Trump’s never-ending tariff roulette will end. Meanwhile, he has threatened the BRICS group of countries, of which India is a prominent member, with additional tariffs. He has also threatened sanctions for Indian imports of Russian oil.

And his warning to American companies that they must not outsource jobs to India, while also embarking on possible tightening of visas for skilled (Indian and other) workers, raises more question marks on how Trump’s eccentricities will affect India. Stepping back to take a broader view of the pervasive uncertainty, no one knows how the global reallocation of production will occur, but one outcome is clear. The head-spinning announcements and reversals have already delivered a body blow to world trade. Even though India is a minor player in world trade, its growth has been highly correlated with global growth. As the world economy falters, so will India’s.

Bluntly stated, the Trump-induced excitement about Indian prospects was always short-sighted and may now prove dangerous. Without human capital generated through quality mass education and increased female labor force participation, India will continue to flounder in global trade.

The GDP growth myth

Unfortunately, a domestic distraction persists: The GDP growth myth. The chatter about high Indian growth disregards an immense body of contrary evidence. Of special relevance are the stubborn structural rigidities in the economy. The share of manufacturing in GDP refuses to rise despite efforts to talk it up. Growth continues to be driven by unchanging sectors: public administration, construction, and finance. More alarming is the retrograde employment structure: not only has employment in manufacturing failed to increase, but agriculture’s share of employment, after rising during COVID, also remains above its pre-COVID level. India’s share of global manufacturing trade is still minuscule, mirroring the lost China-plus-one opportunity.

Yet, champions of the high GDP growth mantra are puzzled: why, they ask, is net FDI shrinking if GDP is growing rapidly. There is no puzzle. India is not growing rapidly.

The facts, as always, are plain. India’s GDP fell more severely than that of any other major economy during the COVID years. As all practicing economists know, after severe contraction, economies briefly grow at above-average rates, and so did India’s. It is a travesty to use those above-average GDP outcomes as measures of performance and potential. The right metric, the average growth rate over the years of the decline and bounceback, is 4.5 per cent a year. That is India’s realistic growth rate in the coming years rather than the over 6 per cent experienced recently.

The same conclusion emerges when we consider the statistical problems in Indian GDP data. As I explained nearly two years ago, a startlingly large part of the high post-COVID growth was the outcome of a mysterious statistical discrepancy. Statistical agencies measure GDP as either the income earned by a country’s nationals or the expenditure on the goods and services they produce. In principle, the two measures must be identical since income earned has to equal the expenditure on output produced. But a large discrepancy between the two approaches, which first appeared just before the Delhi G20 summit in September 2023, made Indian GDP suspect. Income earned, the measure the Indian statistical Ministry uses for GDP, was much higher than the expenditure on goods and services. As I wrote then, despite much smaller discrepancies being the norm, statistical agencies around the world average the two different measures to provide a more balanced estimate of GDP growth.

With such smoothing, we would again conclude that instead of the hyped growth rates, Indian GDP is growing at around 4.5 per cent a year. This was also the growth rate to which the economy had fallen in the year before COVID. So, from all angles, when the erratic features of the GDP series are ironed out, it appears that the Indian economy is growing at between 4 and 5 per cent, not the much higher rates often touted.

A less appreciated but nevertheless important feature of Indian GDP growth is its composition. The composition is particularly important to help understand why domestic consumer demand for goods and services and private investment have been so weak. For decades, and continuing to the present, public administration, construction, and financial services have driven Indian growth. The share of manufacturing in income generation (value-added) has remained unrelentingly around 14 per cent through the years of so-called economic liberalization and despite the more recent PLIs intended to spur manufacturing growth.

The fact is that India is an uncompetitive economy. The growth impetus has therefore come from the government’s spending either on itself or on construction projects; or it has come from a poorly regulated financial sector.

The financial sector has been mired in a culture of scams since “liberalization” began in the early 1990s, and recent financial sector growth has relied on lending to households, which has led them to take on excessive personal debt, placing them at the mercy of rapacious debt collectors and heightening the risk of an Indian financial crisis.

The frenzy continues in ever new forms. Derivatives trading has boomed, making India the world champion in this dubious activity prone to rigging without strict regulation. That unsavory ride to the top in derivatives’ trading occurred exactly during the years India missed the China-plus-one opening in manufactured goods’ trade. Today, Indian markets host over 75 per cent of the global trading volume in equities derivatives—yes, you read that right. As major global players joined India’s derivatives gold rush, domestic investors risked their paltry funds for magical gains. Ninety-three per cent of these small “retail” investors have lost money, according to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). That dismal outcome would not be surprising in the best circumstances. In India’s financial Wild West, the retail investor is at a particular disadvantage. SEBI has only just caught up with Jane Street, a US-based trading firm that used its financial muscle to manipulate the market for extraordinary profits.

The humongous wealth transfer from low- to high-wealth individuals that has already occurred is hard to beat, but it is only a symbol though of a broader malaise. Reportedly, SEBI is not done with Jane Street and is investigating other global hedge funds as well.

Meanwhile, a “shell company scam” is playing out. Shell companies have virtually no assets, sales, or employees. Often they have no more than a difficult-to-trace postal address. They serve such worthy purposes as money laundering. Mysteriously, shell companies with a market value of between Rs.1-2 lakh crore are listed on Indian stock exchanges. This astonishing sum, whether measured in rupees or in dollars ($12-24 billion), has belatedly drawn SEBI’s attention. Typical SEBI, trying to close the barn doors after the horses have bolted. Who knows what other shenanigans are afoot. Cascading losses in stock portfolios could be yet another trigger for a financial crisis.

To be sure, old-fashioned bank scams continue. The Enforcement Directorate has accused the Anil Ambani Group of companies with, among a multitude of sins, of “siphoning off public money”.

Is it any wonder that India’s pattern of economic activity results in anemic job creation? Public administration and financial services require few jobs; construction creates low-quality, financially and physically precarious jobs. Hence, agriculture continues to employ 46 per cent of Indian workers, a share that is higher than before the onset of COVID. Because India’s population and work aspirants are increasing, an increasing share of workers in agriculture implies a breathtaking 75 million more agricultural workers today than in 2018. Meanwhile, the share of workers in manufacturing is stuck at 11.5 per cent. Among non-agricultural sectors, new workers have depended mainly on low-end services and construction.

Even the brief boom in information technology jobs during the COVID years, which pushed the number of IT-related jobs to over five million, has tapered off. Large Indian IT service providers laid off staff in 2024 and have barely added to their payrolls this year. In fact, TCS, India’s largest IT services company, has announced that it will retrench over 12,000 employees, that is 2 per cent of its workforce, in 2025. Artificial intelligence is a further threat to Indian IT jobs: one expert predicts that AI will “crush” entry-level white-collar hiring over the next 24 to 36 months. And matters will only get worse if Trump follows through on requiring American companies to restrict employment of foreign workers. And all of these headwinds plus the poor quality of school and college education for the vast majority raises a big question mark on the aspiration of more employment through high-skilled job creation.

It is past time we stopped fixating on GDP growth. It measures economic welfare poorly. Nearly 60 years ago, in May 1968, then Senator Robert Kennedy memorably said: “Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage…. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning… it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Kennedy’s words still ring true. People’s lived reality depends on employment, health, education, environmental pollution, and access to a fair and speedy justice system. This lived reality gives them their dignity and quality of life. A growing GDP does not even measure purchasing power, being merely an arithmetical product of the deeply constrained discretionary spending of ever-increasing millions of struggling workers. The arithmetic does not add up to an attractive market for investors, another reason why foreign and Indian investors are so skittish.

We have a choice to make. We can immerse ourselves in the narrative of high GDP growth and imminent breakthroughs from the China-plus-one opportunity; we can cheer on Trump’s tariffs despite their damaging impact on world trade and its rules. Or, we can confront reality: investors, despite proclamations of Indian greatness, have acted on an utterly different view of India’s potential. The country’s persistent, unresolved problems block progress, and the Trump-induced unravelling of global trade will harm India profoundly.

Swami Vivekananda often invoked a Katha Upanishad aphorism: “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.” India’s policymakers and media would do well to heed this call. Continued speculations about India’s superpower status mislead and distract. The evidence paints a sobering picture of the economy. This lesson is not that investors are fickle, or policy tinkering will do the trick; it is about fundamentals India refuses to fix. Persistent structural deficiencies—rooted in weak human capital and poor job creation—have kept India from achieving shared and sustainable growth.

To foster genuine progress, India must prioritize quality mass education, empower its female workforce, and create a competitive, fair marketplace for investors and workers. Until policymakers wake up to the country’s long-neglected problems and rise to address them, they will have failed to honor the wisdom conveyed by the revered scriptures and sages. The rhetoric will remain hollow, and global investors will seek opportunities in more dynamic economies.

(Ashoka Mody recently retired from Princeton University. Previously, he worked at the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He is author of EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (2018), and India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today (2023))

(First published in Frontline)