Prime Minister Narendra Modi, from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the eve of the 76th Independence Day, called for turning India into a developed nation in the next 25 years.
The PM set an ambitious target of making India a developed nation by 2047 and made a renewed pitch for cutting import dependence and boosting domestic manufacturing.
But what makes India a developing country and what steps can be taken by authorities to turn it into a developed country in the coming decades?
“Can India easily become a developed economy – not whether it will happen in the next 25 years – I hope so, but we must remember that we move from a lower-income country to a lower middle-income country and that has not been easy to do,” said Mythili Bhusnurmath, Consulting Editor, ET Now.
"To my mind, the biggest challenge is something that perhaps most people have not touched upon. It is the fact that some time in the next few years, we will have to do the delimitation of seats to the Lok Sabha. We are stuck at 543 seats based on the 1971 census that the population distribution has changed dramatically," she said.
"If we do the delimitation as we should, political power will shift even more to the north and the east whereas the economic power even today is concentrated on the west and the south because the imbalance between political and economic power is going to create a great deal of fissure in the country and that is going to be our biggest challenge. If we are able to overcome that, then sky is the limit," she added.
India was classified as a 'third-world' country at the time of independence from British rule in 1947. But over the past seven decades, its GDP has grown from just Rs 2.7 lakh crore to Rs 150 lakh crore.
India, which is the world's sixth largest economy with a GDP of USD 2.7 trillion, is currently classified as a developing nation. India is expected to grow at over 7% in the current fiscal year ending in March 2023 - the fastest among major economies.
The World Bank currently categorises India as a lower-middle income economy - meant for countries with a gross national income per capita of between $1,086 and $4,255. High-income countries, like the United States, have a per capita income of $13,205 or more.
Experts and businessmen have for long banked on India’s demographic dividend as a factor that would spur growth in the years to come. But India has always been at the risk of being unable to capitalise on this advantage. However, an older SBI NSE -0.22 % Research report had suggested that India's strength of demographic dividend could actually turn into India's disadvantage by 2030.
A developed country is typically characterised by a relatively high level of economic growth, a general standard of living, and higher per capita income as well as performing well on the Human Development Index (HDI) which includes education, literacy and health.
Source Name:-Economic Times