India@80: Clear road map, bumpy ride on the long journey to Viksit Bharat

As India marks 80 years of independence, the country is chasing the aspiration of becoming “Viksit Bharat”— its goal of becoming a developed nation by 2047. The objective is clear: to achieve growth and income levels that ensure prosperity for its citizens. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen offered a different yardstick for this journey decades ago. Development, he argued, is not measured by aggregate output but by the expansion of human freedom — the ability of the most vulnerable to eat, learn, work and live without deprivation. That framework still offers perhaps the most honest way to judge how far India has come in these years.

 

Once dismissed as a “third world country”, India is now the world’s sixth-largest economy, behind only the United States, China, Germany, Japan and the UK, and the third-largest by purchasing power, ahead of Germany, Japan and the UK. The path here was not linear, moving from Jawaharlal Nehru’s state-led socialist model through the Planning Commission, the 1991 crisis and reforms, to today’s globally integrated economy. That growth has translated into real gains. According to World Bank estimates, 171 million Indians escaped extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $2.15 a day – in the decade to 2022-23, bringing rural extreme poverty below 3 per cent. Services now generate more than half of gross value added, a decisive shift from the farm-dominated economy of the 1950s. However, India has not managed to become a global manufacturing hub despite repeated attempts. 

 

A country home to the world’s largest population, however, tells a different story when that growth is viewed on a per-person basis. Per capita income has risen more than fifty-fold since 1950-51, yet according to the IMF, India is projected to rank 147th globally in 2027. A weak rupee also explains much of this gap. The domestic currency weakened sharply during the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis and the 2008-09 global financial upheaval, slipping to ₹88.31 to the dollar by 2025-26, a decline of 4.6 per cent in FY26 alone. 

 

Per-capita income is a theoretical concept based on the assumption that income is equally distributed.

 

The World Inequality Lab’s latest findings place India among the most unequal countries in the world: the richest 1 per cent hold roughly 40 per cent of national wealth, while the poorer half share a sliver of the rest. For the first time in 25 years, extreme wealth and deep poverty are rising together rather than apart. 

 

However, this is not the case when inequality is viewed through consumption. According to the World Bank, India’s Gini Index fell from 28.8 in 2011-12 to 25.5 in 2022-23, making it the fourth-most-equal country in the world, after the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Belarus. 

 

Even then, the contradiction is visible in everyday life. It is a common sight in Indian cities: a child tapping a car window at a traffic signal, holding out nothing but the hope of a coin, rather than carrying a schoolbag. The latest Unicef report estimates that 206 million children in India still lack at least one of six basic necessities — housing, clean water, sanitation, nutrition, education or healthcare. 

 

Farmer suicides have dipped only marginally and continue at a rate of one every hour, according to the latest report from the National Crime Records Bureau. 

 

A country that gives Nari Shakti, or women’s empowerment, the highest importance still leaves nearly 60 per cent of working-age women outside the labour force. The International Monetary Fund and other studies show that countries with higher women’s participation in the economy also report higher household incomes, as was the case in the US in the mid-20th century. 

 

The clearest sign that growth and opportunity have stopped moving together is perhaps the case of a country home to the world’s largest youth population. In July 2026, students gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar over leaked examination papers, an agitation large enough to force out the education minister and push through tougher anti-cheating laws. But the anger ran deeper than any one exam. Nearly a quarter of India’s young people are neither studying, working nor learning a skill.

 

India does not lack policy. What it still needs is the systematic, sustained implementation that carries a policy from paper to the person it was written for, closing the gap between the country’s economic size and the everyday freedoms of its citizens.