India needs strategy to tackle challenges, boost global share: Ex-Niti VC

India's leadership needs to mobilise all necessary talent to design and implement a development strategy and respond to challenges facing the country, said a new book co-authored by former NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar.

The book titled 'Everything All at Once: India and the Six Simultaneous Global Transitions', co-authored by Kumar with Ishan Joshi, offers a timely and thought-provoking perspective on the seismic changes currently reshaping the world with a significant impact on India's future prospects.

"India's leadership has to mobilise all necessary talents and resources to design and implement a development strategy that innovatively responds to these multiple challenges and effectively exploits the opportunities that are inherent in the evolving trends for meeting our goals," the book says.

Noting that never before in the history of global economic development did countries have to contend with such enormous challenges while pursuing their development agenda, the book says the long -term development goal for India must be to meet the exploding aspirations of its young population, which was braodly captured in the term Viksit Bharat propagated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"The highest level of aspiration of Viksit Bharat would be to restore India's position in the world by 2050 - which would mark the centenary of India emerging as a sovereign republic - as it was prior to being colonised," it said.

Explaining further, the book says this would imply increasing its share in the world economy from present 3 per cent to 18 per cent, which according to Angus Maddison was India's share in 1850.

"With the global GDP estimated to easily cross $200 trillion by 2050, India's GDP will have to be over $36 trillion from the present $3.8 trillion requiring an annual average growth rate of about 9 per cent over the next two-and -a half decades," it said.

The book says six major global transitions are unfolding simultaneously-- geopolitical, geoeconomic, geographical, the rise of the South, climate change, and technology breakthroughs.

These, simultaneously occurring transitions, present both challenges and historic opportunities for India, it added.

The authors argue that 'chaos, contestation, and constant recalibration' of policy design will define the global landscape for the foreseeable future.

It is within this context that the authors ask an urgent question: Where does this leave over 800 million young Indians with their burgeoning aspirations and diminishing certainties?  And how will the policy response need to jettison the business as usual' approach to respond to these challenges and uncertainties, and achieve the national goal of becoming Viksit Bharat over the next 25 years, the book wonders.

The book carefully analyses the nature of these six transitions and, on that basis, outlines a flexible policy approach that is rooted in India's ground realities.

The authors argue that the government will have to adopt a self-designed policy framework if India is to successfully navigate these transitions and unlock its vast potential for simultaneously accelerating its economic growth, reducing its carbon footprint, and ensuring satisfactory living standards for its young population.