Without investing in education, health, and jobs, the 2047 dream will remain a slogan
“A superpower is not built on abstract (and massaged) GDP numbers alone. It needs a foundation that guarantees high-quality education, health, and jobs. It needs a scaffolding of administrative efficiency and judicial responsibility. It needs a vision that believes in equality and inclusive growth. None of these prerequisites are in sight yet.”
In his August 2023 Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “In 2047, when the country celebrates 100 years of independence, my country will be a developed India.”
In July 2024, Martin Wolf of Financial Times referred to Modi’s quote and wrote: “Is [this] aspiration a feasible one? Yes. Is it a plausible one? No.”
Wolf went on to compare India with Greece, which is the poorest country that the IMF ranks as “advanced”: “If [India’s] GDP per head were to match that of Greece by 2047, the rate of growth would need to rise to 7.5 per cent a year.” But, as the economist Ashoka Mody writes in our Cover Story, once statistical irregularities are stripped away, many economists estimate India’s real GDP to be hovering around 4-5 per cent only.
More importantly, even if India were to match the US itself in economic output (GDP) and purchasing power parity, numbers achievable by India’s sheer size, it would still lag in overall productivity, technology, and human development. This is the blind spot the government deliberately refuses to acknowledge. Or address. Thus, what makes the superpower dream feasible is India’s human capital, its vast sea of people. What makes it implausible is India’s continuing neglect of its human capital.
As the economist Dani Rodrik argued, India fell behind countries like China, Vietnam, and South Korea not because of a lack of ambition, but because sustained growth requires structural transformation, including jobs moving from agriculture to manufacturing. In India, manufacturing accounts for just 12 per cent of employment while agricultural employment is, worryingly, rising.
A Harvard Kennedy School paper shows South Korea’s manufacturing jobs falling in 1989, when its per capita income was almost $8,000, while India’s manufacturing jobs began to drop in 2002, when its per capita income was less than $900. Thus, alarmingly, India had begun to de-industrialize long before per capita incomes were anywhere close to global standards. And nothing was created to replace those manufacturing jobs. In his interview to Frontline, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan speaks of multilevel responses: “We can create many more jobs, but for that we need skill building.”
And that is the point Mody makes too, when he writes that without mass education leading to more jobs and higher productivity, and a focus on more women in the workforce leading to generational continuity, sustained economic growth (to push India into the “developed” category) is just not possible. Ironically, it took a comment by the pesky Donald Trump characterizing India as a “dead economy” to initiate sudden parliamentary attention on the subject.
The Prime Minister’s ambition of India becoming a global superpower by 2047 is laudable, but it will need his government to rapidly upgrade the country’s education and health levels to global standards. This is unlikely to happen because of the Hindutva vision that necessarily drives his policy decisions. Ideological compulsions make the BJP a reactionary force, more interested in romanticizing the past than in crafting a new future. Look at the sharp rise in the country of an unscientific temper, the eagerness to replace history with mythology, science with mysticism, knowledge with piety. Allowing ideology to creep into the very essentials that ensure the enhancement of human capital can only push India backwards.
A superpower is not built on abstract (and massaged) GDP numbers alone. It needs a foundation that guarantees high-quality education, health, and jobs. It needs a scaffolding of administrative efficiency and judicial responsibility. It needs a vision that believes in equality and inclusive growth. None of these prerequisites are in sight yet.
(Vaishna Roy is the Editor of Frontline)
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