Not Just Another Policy Book: A Former CEA's Ground-Level View Of India's Economic Future

India@100: Envisioning Tomorrow’s Economic Powerhouse. Krishnamurthy Subramanian. Rupa. Pages 520. Rs 697.

What will India’s economy look like in 2047? Will it be $20 trillion, $26 trillion, or even higher? The answer depends on the assumptions underlying these projections.

Krishnamurthy Subramanian, in his recent book, predicts a bold $55 trillion. His projection hinges on the power of compounding: with an 8 per cent annual GDP growth rate, moderate inflation, and slight currency depreciation, India’s economy could double every six years, achieving “four doublings” from its current $3.73 trillion size by the time it celebrates its centenary of independence.

While ambitious, this figure remains aspirational. Subramanian acknowledges more conservative scenarios: with 5.6 per cent annual per capita GDP growth, India’s economy would reach $29 trillion by 2047; at 6.6 per cent, it could hit $40.9 trillion. To achieve the $55 trillion mark, however, per capita GDP growth would need to average 7.5 per cent annually—a steep challenge, but not entirely out of reach. China has done it especially between 2007 to 2020. Can India do it too?

Realizing this trajectory, however, would require India to overcome significant hurdles. The law of diminishing returns suggests maintaining high growth rates becomes harder as economies mature. While China sustained such growth for decades, replicating that model in India would demand extensive structural and process reforms. India must tackle bottlenecks in governance, infrastructure, and labor markets while fostering innovation and investments. Without such reforms, sustaining the required growth rate for a $55 trillion economy will be difficult.  

By 2023, India’s GDP had reached $3.73 trillion, and it is poised to cross the $4 trillion mark soon. The once-aspirational $5 trillion goal, originally slated for 2024-25, now looks likely to be achieved around 2026-27—a delay shaped by the pandemic but not a derailment of India’s economic ambitions. 

The devil, as always, lies in the details. Growth projections hinge on a cocktail of factors: GDP growth rates, inflation, population trends, and the rupee’s exchange rate. Even small changes in assumptions—a difference of half a percentage point in growth—can have exponential effects over decades. 

Beyond sheer economic size, the real challenge lies in transitioning from a lower-middle-income country, with a per capita income of $2,600 in 2024, to a high-income nation by 2047. This requires not only robust GDP growth but also significant improvements in social indicators like education, healthcare, and income equality. China was 

The real question, however, isn’t just about GDP size; it’s about what those numbers mean for India’s journey toward becoming a developed economy. Today, there’s no universally accepted definition of “developed,” but benchmarks like the Human Development Index (HDI) and per capita income offer clues.

For India to qualify as developed by 2047, its HDI must rise from 0.633 to over 0.800—a significant leap requiring progress in education, healthcare, and income equality. Meanwhile, per capita income, currently at $2,600, would need to soar past $13,205 to enter the high-income category. Some forecasts suggest India could fall just short, reaching $12,000, while others predict it could break through, transforming its global economic stature.

This is where Subramanian’s work becomes important. India @100 is structured into five sections, with the first providing a broad overview. The remaining four sections delve into the foundational pillars that, according to the author, will shape Atmanirbhar Bharat @100. To realize the Prime Minister’s vision of a self-reliant India, Subramanian argues that the country’s economic strategy must rest on these four pillars: a macroeconomic focus on growth, inclusive development to build a thriving middle class, ethical wealth creation, and a virtuous cycle ignited by private investment.

Two critical areas frequently discussed but largely neglected over the past few decades are judicial and bureaucratic reforms and their impact on economic growth. Subramanian compellingly highlights these as essential prerequisites for the nation’s progress. He puts them in the first pillar of his framework amongst other things. 

In 1993, the Bollywood film Damini gave us the iconic courtroom lament: “Tarikh pe tarikh, tarikh pe tarikh!”—a phrase that captured India’s judicial delays with tragic accuracy. Thirty-two years later, the backlog has only worsened. Over 6.2 million cases are stuck in High Courts, nearly 45 million in District Courts (10 million civil cases). The sheer scale of delay is an economic straitjacket.

Consider Malda District Court, where a partition suit filed in 1952 had its first hearing in 2017—65 years later. Plaintiffs and defendants died, heirs were added, and the case dragged on. When commercial disputes, land cases, and contract enforcement stretch across generations, economic activity grinds to a halt. Investors hesitate, businesses suffer, and legal uncertainty stifles growth. E-Courts and NJDG have exposed just how deep the problem runs, but transparency alone won’t fix it. Fast-track courts, despite additional funding, have failed to clear old cases. Unlike the Supreme Court, which actively targets century-old appeals, High Courts and District Courts remain buried under an avalanche of pending cases. When Damini hit the screens, tarikh pe tarikh was a punchline. Today, it’s a national economic crisis. 

Subramanian provides a detailed analysis of judicial pendency, disposal rates, comparisons with global peers, case clearance rates, and strategies for addressing legal backlogs. He argues that instead of creating additional judicial positions, the priority should be filling existing vacancies. While it is undeniable that reducing judicial backlog would yield significant economic and social benefits, his recommendations, though valuable, remain incremental. A more comprehensive approach is needed, including exploring bolder, structural reforms to address the issue at its core.

A radical approach to reforming India’s judiciary is to make judicial performance measurable, accountable, and outcome-driven by instituting stringent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for judges. The inefficiencies plaguing court processes are no longer just a governance issue—they are an economic and social crisis that demands urgent intervention.

If India is to emerge as a developed economy by 2047, the judiciary must evolve into a precision-driven institution that can keep pace with rising disputes and enforcement complexities. Judicial efficiency must no longer be a vague aspiration but a quantifiable metric. Case clearance rates, trial date certainty, disposition times, and enforcement timelines should determine judicial assessments, promotions, and resource allocations.

Global best practices—from the International Framework for Court Excellence to Europe’s judicial performance benchmarks—demonstrate that rigorous performance measurement is key to clearing backlogs and ensuring access to justice. India’s existing frameworks, such as the National Court Management System (NCMS) and the National Framework on Court Excellence (NFCE), have failed to translate into real systemic improvements due to fragmented and inconsistent data collection.

The solution is to establish a centralized, transparent judicial performance matrix with enforceable benchmarks—judges who repeatedly fail to meet these must be held accountable. Anything short of this is merely tinkering at the edges of a broken system. 

In the next chapter, the author has also discussed various avenues for bureaucratic reforms. The proposed bureaucratic reforms—emphasizing specialization, open competition for senior positions, fixed-term contracts, and qualified immunity—are pragmatic but insufficient for India to achieve sustained 7.5 per cent annual GDP growth for the next 24 years.

These measures, while necessary, remain incremental and primarily attempt to optimize an outdated system rather than fundamentally reengineer governance to match India’s ambitions. The focus on specialization and performance-linked incentives is a positive step, but without deeper structural changes, these reforms will not eliminate the core inefficiencies that slow down decision-making, policy implementation, and economic progress.

To drive truly transformative change, India must undertake far more radical reforms.

First, deep decentralization is necessary—decision-making power must shift from the union and state governments to urban local bodies and panchayats, ensuring that governance is closer to the people and more responsive. This requires not just devolution of responsibilities but also financial autonomy, allowing local governments to raise and manage their own resources effectively.

Second, India must replace tenure-based promotions with a fully meritocratic system where real-time performance metrics dictate career progression rather than seniority. This should include objective key performance indicators (KPIs), live dashboards for project tracking, and direct public accountability mechanisms that citizens can access.

Third, a radical overhaul of digital governance is required. India’s bureaucratic processes are still too paper-based, hierarchical, and slow. Countries like Estonia have demonstrated how end-to-end digitization—through AI-assisted decision-making, blockchain for transparency, and automated service delivery—can revolutionize governance. India must embrace governance-as-a-platform models, using technology to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce discretion, and accelerate execution.

Fourth, rather than merely allowing private-sector professionals into senior bureaucratic positions, the entire structure of governance should be redesigned to ensure technocratic decision-making—this means institutionalizing independent expert bodies in key areas like finance, trade, and infrastructure, with decision-making authority rather than just advisory roles.

Fifth, radical labor reforms within government are essential. Performance-linked salaries should be extended across all levels, redundancy must be addressed, and non-performing employees should be phased out, ensuring an agile, accountable public workforce.

Sixth, India must reduce the layers of approvals and clearances that make governance slow and inefficient. An Administrative Efficiency Commission should be set up to systematically eliminate outdated laws, redundant procedures, and unnecessary regulations that serve no purpose but to delay projects and increase bureaucratic red tape.

The second pillar of the book focuses on socio-economic inclusion as a strategic imperative, arguing that inclusive policies are not just morally desirable but also politically and economically beneficial. It challenges the traditional notion that welfare spending and economic growth are at odds, demonstrating how technology-driven governance has enabled better targeting of subsidies and reduced pilferage. By linking good economics with good politics, the book highlights how the Modi government’s policies over the last decade have contributed to a sharp reduction in poverty and inequality in both rural and urban areas.

A central theme of this section is employment-driven inclusion, emphasizing that job creation is the most sustainable way to bring individuals into the economic mainstream. The author argues that job creation in India is contingent upon small firms transitioning into large enterprises rather than remaining stagnant.

He highlights that while small firms (those with fewer than 99 employees) constitute over 83 per cent of all firms, they account for only 21.5 per cent of employment and a mere 12.4 per cent of net value added (NVA). In contrast, large firms, which make up only 16.8 per cent of firms, contribute 78.5 per cent of employment and 87.6 per cent of NVA.

The issue of “dwarfism”—firms that remain small despite aging beyond 10 years—exacerbates this problem, as dwarfs make up 58 per cent of firms but contribute only 14.8 per cent of employment and 6.3 per cent of NVA. The author advocates policies that incentivize “infant firms” (young firms with growth potential) over dwarfs.

He proposes reorienting priority-sector lending to focus on high-employment-elasticity sectors such as apparel, leather, electronics, and tourism, implementing a sunset clause on incentives to ensure firms graduate beyond infancy, and shifting MSME policies to reward growth rather than stagnation. He also discusses the Atmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana, which led to 6 million new hires across 150,000 firms, as a case study of how direct government intervention can support employment.

While these proposals offer a solid foundation, they overlook key structural issues that impede large-scale job creation.

First, labour market rigidity remains a major bottleneck. The four labour codes are yet to be notified by the states. They should be immediately notified.

Second, the cost of formalization remains high, discouraging small firms from growing into formal enterprises. Streamlining GST compliance, reducing regulatory licenses, and integrating digital governance solutions (such as faceless assessments for businesses for indirect taxes) could ease this transition.

Third, beyond incentivizing specific sectors, India must enhance skill development at scale—current government schemes have had low placement rates, and vocational training must align more closely with industry demands.

Finally, while the focus on MSMEs is necessary, foreign direct investment (FDI) in labor-intensive manufacturing should be aggressively pursued through lowering corporate taxes for employment-generating industries and reducing import tariffs on critical components to make Indian manufacturing globally competitive.

Without addressing these deeper constraints, the economy will struggle to generate 6 million jobs annually this decade and maintain long-term employment-intensive growth.

The book also stresses the need for leveraging India’s demographic advantage by focusing on labor-intensive sectors and promoting “Assemble in India” as a stepping stone to full-scale manufacturing competitiveness.

Beyond employment, the second pillar extends the inclusion agenda to digital public infrastructure (DPI), climate justice, agriculture, and poverty alleviation. It highlights how DPI has democratized access to essential services, making financial inclusion and welfare delivery more efficient. The book also critiques the global asymmetries in climate policy, arguing that climate action must be equitable and sensitive to the developmental needs of countries like India.

In agriculture, the book underscores the importance of small farmers as the backbone of agrarian reform, advocating for policies that directly enhance their productivity and market access. Finally, it integrates insights from various economic surveys on Thalinomics and the Bare Necessities Index, using behavioral economics and nudges to outline a roadmap for reducing poverty and improving living standards.

Overall, this pillar argues that economic growth alone is not enough—India’s rise as a global powerhouse requires broad-based socio-economic inclusion. By prioritizing employment, technological access, fair climate policies, and rural revitalization, the book presents a vision where growth is not just sustained but also equitably distributed across all segments of society.

The third pillar highlights the need to balance economic freedom with ethical governance to ensure sustainable wealth creation. It identifies two key challenges stemming from India’s socialist past. First, entrenched interests that benefited from the previous system continue to resist privatization and economic reforms, particularly in non-strategic sectors where the government has no business being involved. These groups, having historically wielded control over national resources, still oppose moves towards a more market-driven economy. Second, the legacy of cronyism from the socialist era has led to wealth creation being viewed with suspicion, reinforcing the belief that business success is linked to political connections rather than merit.

To address these challenges, the text underscores the importance of Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) to foster competition and private enterprise while ensuring that rule of law governs economic activity to make wealth creation ethical. Excessive government intervention is seen as an impediment to innovation and prosperity.

The text argues for reducing needless state control, fostering competition and entrepreneurship, and embracing creative destruction, which allows outdated industries to be replaced by more innovative ventures. It also advocates for privatization as a means to unlock economic potential by transferring state-owned enterprises to the private sector, stimulating investment and enhancing economic dynamism. 

The focus on creative destruction is an important thing which the author has stressed on. The author rightly points out that in terms of crate output, India doesn’t perform well. India needs greater thrust on innovation. Government still does heavy lifting as far as innovation is concerned. The private sector must do more, period. However, there are inefficiencies in doing research in our public institutions also.

Recently, Swarajya has done a fantastic report on the problems with R&D in India. It has identified several issues with R&D ecosystem in India. The key challenges for conducting research in India extend beyond inadequate funding and include systemic issues in public-sector R&D institutions.

A rigid hierarchical culture stifles innovation, with a ‘senior knows best’ attitude discouraging younger researchers from challenging authority or introducing new ideas. Office politics and turf wars dominate, as individuals prioritize securing their own positions over fostering collaboration and meritocracy.

Bureaucratic inefficiencies, including excessive red tape and non-technical priorities, hinder project execution, with finance officials often obstructing progress due to risk aversion or lack of technical understanding. The lack of clear accountability due to committee-based decision-making leads to blame-shifting and inefficiencies, unlike private-sector models where a single agency oversees a project end-to-end.

Consequently, top talent, frustrated by the system, either leaves for private R&D roles, moves abroad, or exits the field entirely, leading to a significant opportunity cost for India’s technological progress. Some of these issues have also been discussed by the author in the book. Addressing these structural and cultural barriers is critical for India to bridge the R&D gap with global leaders.

The fourth and final pillar is virtuous cycle ignited by the private sector. It highlights the essential role of a strong financial sector in driving economic growth by channeling savings into productive investments, facilitating capital formation, and ensuring businesses have access to affordable credit.

A well-functioning financial system is crucial not just for large firms but also for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are vital for job creation and economic dynamism. However, India’s financial sector faces challenges such as limited credit availability, high borrowing costs, and inefficiencies in financial intermediation. Strengthening this sector requires reforms to improve banking infrastructure, deepen capital markets, enhance financial inclusion, and create a more efficient credit allocation system.

Addressing these issues will not only boost private investment but also make it easier for entrepreneurs and businesses to scale, fostering innovation and long-term economic resilience. By ensuring that financial resources are effectively mobilized and allocated, India can sustain high growth and create widespread economic opportunities, making development more inclusive and equitable.

The unique selling proposition of this book lies in its structured approach—each chapter not only diagnoses key policy challenges but also concludes with clear, implementable policy recommendations. This is a significant departure from the usual genre of policy-oriented books, which often tend to be filled with high-level, feel-good statements about economic growth, governance, and reforms. While these books may offer insightful analysis, they rarely provide concrete, actionable steps for policymakers, businesses, or bureaucrats to act upon. Even when recommendations are included, they are often vague, overly academic, or detached from the realities of governance, making them impractical for actual implementation.

What sets this book apart is the practicality and specificity of its policy prescriptions. Dr. Subramanian’s tenure in government gives him a rare vantage point—straddling both academia and public administration. He understands not just the economic theory behind reforms but also the bureaucratic, political, and institutional constraints that determine whether a policy idea can be implemented. This makes his recommendations both ambitious and realistic—not just wishful thinking but grounded in the operational realities of government.

One of the recurring critiques across reviews of this book is the ambitious projections regarding the size of the Indian economy by 2047. The estimated USD 55 trillion figure put forth by Dr. Subramanian is undoubtedly bold, and it is natural for readers and analysts to debate the feasibility of such a target. After all, economic forecasting over such a long horizon is inherently uncertain—different experts will have different models, assumptions, and numbers. One could argue about whether India will reach USD 20 trillion, 50 trillion, or somewhere in between, but fixating on the exact figure misses the larger point.

What truly matters—and what makes this book valuable—is not the end-state number but the roadmap it provides to get there. The book offers specific, implementable policy prescriptions aimed at sustaining high, steady growth over the next 25 years, ensuring that India’s economic trajectory remains strong, regardless of whether it ultimately hits a predefined GDP target.

The focus should not be on debating whether the economy will be USD 55 trillion or USD 25 trillion, but rather on whether India can adopt the right policies to maximize its economic potential. That is the real contribution of this book—a well-argued, data-backed blueprint for long-term economic growth. Whether one agrees with the projected numbers or not, this book is worth reading for its substantive policy insights, not just its headline forecasts.

Aditya Sinha (X:adityasinha004) is a public policy professional and a former OSD, Research, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. Views Personal.