challenges before India in 2050 essay writing
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In 35 years you and I will, going by the average age of newspaper readers and life expectancy in India, be dead. Let’s have a look at the country we are likely to leave behind in 2049. First, let’s deflate the optimists. In a 2011 report, Citigroup predicted India would be the world’s biggest economy before 2050. “We expect India’s real per capita GDP to grow at 6.4% pa over the 40-year period between 2010 and 2050 (7.2% pa over the next 10 years and at rates of 7.7% pa between 2020 and 2030 and 5.2% pa between 2030 and 2050). As a result, we expect India to become the largest economy in the world by 2050, overtaking China and the US in the process."
This leap would produce an Indian economy of $85 trillion (around ₹ 5,250 trillion) in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms (up from just under $4 trillion in 2010). Unfortunately, the study’s immediate prediction of Indian growth at 7.2% between 2010 and 2015 turned out to be wrong. And there’s no guarantee that its mapping further on is going to be any more accurate.
Four years ago, when we were growing at 9%, I wrote in Mint Lounge that India’s high growth could not be sustained. I don’t think this will change, irrespective of policy tweaking by Central governments.
The other thing is what the economy means to the average Indian. Net national income is today about ₹ 70,000 per person per year according to the Central Statistics Office.India’s incomes are the lowest among Brics nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Median per capita income (meaning more than half the population) is only a little over ₹ 35,000.
This group will be only slightly better off in the next generation.
Second, our two major internal national security problems are Kashmir and the North-East. Both will be resolved in the sense that they will no longer be violent. My guess is that with both, there will be a compromise within the states because of India’s insistence on democracy. The economic migration of these states’ citizens in India is already blunting their secessionary spirit.