New Delhi: Chief economic advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran recently said that the Indian economy will be a $3 trillion one at current prices by the end of the 2022-23 fiscal year and is expected to be $7 trillion in the next seven years.
It took India nearly 60 years to become a trillion dollar economy in 2007. India’s GDP is currently $3.4 trillion.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi famously envisioned that India would become a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25.
Since then, several Union ministers and others in the government have spoken along similar or grander lines.
Earlier this year, Bibek Debroy, chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister said that India’s GDP will be close to $20 trillion by 2047.
In December last year, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar said that India will not only become a $5 trillion economy by 2025 but also a significant manufacturing hub.
Reports at around the same time said that the Centre for Economics and Business Research had published that India will become a $10 trillion economy by 2035 given the growth trajectory of its GDP.
In September last year, Union oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that India is on the path to becoming a $10 trillion economy by 2030 (five years before CEBR’s prediction) and the third largest economy in the world by 2047.
In August, junior Union minister for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that India is “poised to be a trillion dollar digital economy” and could support 60 to 65 million digitally enabled jobs by 2025-26.
In April, the Union finance ministry said in a statement that India is “on its way to become a $ 5 trillion economy” without specifying by when.
In March, Niti Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar said that India becoming a $ 5-trillion economy “is not rhetoric” and could double itself (from a $2.7 trillion economy then) in “7-8 years if it grows at 8%.”
This, Kumar said, was feasible because India had sustained a growth rate of 8.5% before.
The World Bank has estimated that India’s economic growth will slow to 6.6% in the financial year (April to March) 2023-24 from an expected 6.9% in the current fiscal. In its latest Global Economic Prospects report, it said the global economy and rising uncertainty will weigh on export and investment growth in India.
At the start of 2023, The Wire had reported that there is reason to believe that the overview of the Indian economy this year is rather grim. India’s current account deficit hit a new all-time high in the July-September 2022 quarter, at $36.4 billion. India’s unemployment rate also rose to 8.3% in December, the highest in 16 months. In addition, the Indian rupee ended 2022 as the worst-performing currency in all of Asia.