Mint Quick Edit | Let’s not oversell our $4 trillion economy
India’s economy will rank the world’s fourth this year to reach an impressive size. Highlight it, by all means, but we also need a strategic balance in the messages we send out.
On Saturday, Niti Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam cited data from the International Monetary Fund to say that India was overtaking Japan this year to become the world’s fourth-largest national economy, with only the US, China and Germany larger.
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“We are a $4 trillion economy as I speak," he was quoted as saying. To put this in a physical perspective, if this sum were to be stacked up in wads of $1 bills, it would form a stack 437,360km-high—longer than the distance to the Moon.
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This is impressive, like the other marker we frequently highlight: of India being the world’s fastest growing major economy. The country’s heft on the world stage and attraction as an investment destination should grow accordingly.
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Yet, by global reckoning, we remain in the lower middle income bracket, which spells a need to keep our signalling balanced. Although the broad idea that developing countries need a special leg-up in everyone’s interest has fallen out of favour in the US, it could survive today’s upheavals.
To sustain and advance this argument multilaterally, we should make it a point to keep showing solidarity with the Global South on the challenge of uplifting livelihoods.
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