India's Growth Dreams Need a Reality Check

5:14 AM ETDeveloping

Health Desk

In Short: Economic growth in India, celebrated in recent quarters, faces scrutiny due to persistent issues like youth unemployment and macroeconomic challenges, prompting calls for a more inclusive growth model.

Mark Twain's caution about statistics in 1906-07 offers a pertinent reminder as India celebrates its recent growth data, underscoring the need for a critical examination of the economic narrative.

Intersectional growth validation is proposed as a mechanism to better understand and address the disparities in who benefits from economic growth in India's diverse economic landscape.

Easier access to commercial credit and increased loanable funds have fueled growth, but the current data suggests little change in the structural composition of India's growth story, raising questions about shared prosperity.

While high growth is essential for India's progress towards 2047, ensuring that all segments of society benefit is equally crucial to achieving sustainable and inclusive economic development.

What's confirmed

What's still developing

Mark Twain, back in 1906-07, in his autobiography, said: “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’” Twain’s famous assertion on the oft-ignored cautions of statistics’ magical realism offers important context in reading India’s recently celebrated quarterly estimates on growth data and its implications for the Indian economy at a time when its own performance on jobs, rising youth unemployment, and macroeconomic management of its balance of payments and currency remains under question.
I have argued for intersectional growth validation as an economic mechanism to be established in the formal interpretation of India’s heterogeneously placed economic landscape, where “who” participates and benefits in higher “real” growth and who doesn’t warrant explanation.
These trends have been broadly fuelled by easier access to commercial credit and the increase in access to the supply of loanable funds, allowing for growth in capital for production-consumption needs.
This point is vital in emphasising that while “high” growth is imperative for India in its march towards 2047, what is equally critical is shared prosperity in terms of higher income for Indians across classes and different economic and social groups.

Sources

The Indian Expresslink