India to drive 20 pc of global economic growth in next decade: Kant

NEW DELHI: India will be driving 20 per cent of the world's economic growth in the next decade as it continues its march to become the third largest economy globally, according to G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant.

Speaking at the AIMA convention here, he noted that India continues to be the fastest-growing large economy in the world and is the fifth-largest economy.

"In the next three years, we will overtake Japan and Germany to be the third largest economy in the world. In a world which is starved for growth, India is an outlier and has emerged as a very resilient powerhouse driving growth," he stated.

The country will be driving 20 per cent of the world's economic growth in the next decade, he added.

"What we are witnessing today is a once-in-a-generation shift in our economic position. Just a few years back, we were in the fragile five, and from the fragile five, we moved to the top five in a decade," Kant said.

He noted that the country needs to transform the lives of people living in rural areas, improve health outcomes and enhance nutritional standards to become a developed nation by 2047.

India needs several champion states to drive future growth, Kant said.

"If India is to grow at 9-10 per cent over the next three decades and become a developed economy by 2047, we need to improve our learning outcomes, our health outcomes and nutritional standards in a very big way," he added.

This means that many states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, which account for almost 50 per cent of the country's population, need to be transformed, he said.

"It is very critical that we transform them. It is important that they become the key driver of improvement on the human development index," Kant said.

Elaborating further, he said that the top 50 per cent of India's population actually creates growth and drives prosperity. And the bottom 50 per cent lives mainly in rural areas, relying on agriculture wage labour or government welfare schemes to achieve basic living standards, he added.

"It is important that we transform the lives of these people to the bottom 50 per cent," he stated.