India can be an upper-middle-income country by 2047: Bibek Debroy

NEW DELHI: India can become an upper-middle-income country by 2047 if it manages to achieve a sustained growth rate of 7-7.5 per cent for the next 25 years, EAC-PM chairman Bibek Debroy said on Tuesday.

The country can become a $20 trillion economy by 2047 at this growth rate, he added. India, the world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of $2.7 trillion, is currently classified as a developing nation.

“Even if you have relatively conservative real rates of growth of 7-7.5 per cent, we will get to a per capita income of about $10,000. “And you will get to a total size of the economy of a little less than $20 trillion in 2047,” the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) chairman said while releasing ‘The Competitiveness Roadmap for India@100’.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set an ambitious target of making India a developed nation by 2047. “…which means India will be in the upper middle-income category, not a higher-income category,” Debroy said, adding it also means that the nature of Indian society will be completely transformed.

According to the World Bank’s definition, a country with a per capita annual income of over $12,000 is considered as a higher-income nation. Noting that because what happens to India is an aggregate of what happens to the states, Debroy said, “And unless, the states jack up their growth records, the overall growth records for India is not going be that high either”.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the Indian economy is forecast to expand by 7.4 per cent in 2022-23, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. A developed country is typically characterised by a relatively high level of economic growth, a general standard of living, and higher per capita income as well as performing well on the Human Development Index, which includes education, literacy and health.

India was classified as a ‘third-world’ country at the time of Independence from British rule in 1947. But, over the past seven decades, its GDP has grown from just Rs 2.7 lakh crore to Rs 150 lakh crore.