Finance Secretary T. V Somanathan on Thursday that India will continue to clock the highest growth rate among the top five economies in the world in the foreseeable future and asked the Indian diaspora to act as a catalyst and supplement government efforts in making India the biggest opportunity. India is currently the fifth-largest economy in the world. The top four are the US, China, Japan, and Germany.
An S&P Global report earlier this month projected India’s economy to double to USD 6.7 trillion by 2031 from USD 3.4 trillion currently. “India is already the world’s fifth-largest economy, and it is the largest country by population. India’s rate of growth by any measure is much faster than the top four. Today, we can safely say that all four are likely to have lower growth rates than India in the foreseeable future.
“In terms of the size of opportunity, India is arguably the biggest development opportunity of the future because we are large and we are growing faster than the other large economies,” Somanathan said in his address at the Indiaspora G20 forum. The Indian economy grew at a rate of 7.2 percent in 2022–23, and economists peg GDP growth to be in the range of 6–6.5 percent in the current fiscal year (April–March). The top bureaucrat in the finance ministry asserted that India is the “most beautiful opportunity in the world,” and the extent to which India harnesses this opportunity will mainly depend not on the diaspora but on India’s domestic policies and domestic population.
He said there are three channels through which the diaspora can influence: fund flow, trade, and knowledge. “If we do the right things, and we are doing the right things right now, then you can be a catalyst and a strong accelerator in what India can achieve,” he said, adding that in India’s present stage of development, knowledge transfer will become increasingly important.