I was reading through some news last night and came across something that really caught my attention. India’s Chief Economic Advisor, V. Anantha Nageswaran, made a pretty startling statement about what it’ll take for India to become a developed nation by 2047. Speaking at Columbia University’s India Summit, he said India needs to create a whopping 80 lakh jobs (that’s 8 million!) every single year for at least the next decade. That’s… a lot of jobs.
The Mountain India Needs to Climb
“We have a vision to achieve a developed India by 2047. The biggest challenge, apart from India’s size, is that the external environment is not going to be so benign for the next 10-20 years as one might have had in the last 30 years, starting from 1990 or so,” Nageswaran said.
I couldn’t help but think about what this means on the ground. Can you imagine creating 80 lakh new jobs every year? That’s like building employment opportunities for the entire population of New York City—annually! And they’re trying to do this in a world that’s getting more complicated and less cooperative than the relatively stable decades we saw after 1990.
The thing is, this isn’t just some arbitrary economic target. With millions of young Indians joining the workforce every year, these jobs are absolutely necessary. Without them, you’re looking at a potential social crisis, not just an economic hiccup.
Making Stuff and Supporting Small Businesses
One thing Nageswaran emphasized was that India needs to boost its manufacturing sector. This makes sense to me—service jobs are great, but manufacturing jobs often pay better and can employ people with different kinds of skills and education levels.
“We have to generate 8 million jobs per year at least for the next 10 to 12 years… And raise the manufacturing share of GDP, in the context of China having achieved such a tremendous manufacturing dominance, especially post-COVID,” he pointed out.
But here’s the interesting part—he also stressed that small and medium businesses are crucial to this plan. “Countries that became manufacturing powerhouses did not do so without having a viable small and medium enterprise sector,” he said. I’ve seen this in my own travels—countries with strong manufacturing usually have this ecosystem of smaller suppliers and specialized companies supporting the bigger factories. It’s not just about attracting giant corporations.
The AI Elephant in the Room
The part that really got me thinking was Nageswaran’s comments on technology and artificial intelligence. Unlike countries that industrialized decades ago, India is trying to develop in an era when AI and automation are rapidly changing what “work” even means.
“India, with its size, has to navigate this huge, complex challenge, and there are no easy answers,” he acknowledged. “If you look at the number of jobs we need to create, it’s about 8 million jobs a year. And artificial intelligence may have a big role in taking away entry-level jobs, or low IT-enabled services jobs may come under threat.”
I’ve been reading about AI’s impact on jobs for a while now, and this seems like a uniquely difficult problem. How do you create tens of millions of jobs when technology is simultaneously eliminating many traditional entry-level positions? It’s like trying to fill a bathtub while someone’s pulling the plug.
Nageswaran put it well when he said, “It is one thing to prepare the population for a world dominated by AI, but it is another thing to ensure that we find the right balance between labor-centric policies and technology.” This isn’t just about letting tech companies decide the future—governments have a huge role in shaping how these technologies are deployed.
Changing How India Grows
Another fascinating point was how India’s growth formula is shifting. Back in the early 2000s, exports were driving nearly 40% of India’s GDP growth. That dropped to 20% in the next decade, and Nageswaran expects it’ll be even lower going forward.
This means India can’t just follow the export-led playbook that worked for countries like Japan, South Korea, or China. They’ll need to focus more on domestic consumption and investment while still maintaining global competitiveness.
For this to work, they need better infrastructure, smoother logistics, higher-quality products, and more R&D. Basically, they need to do more with what they have while continuing to push for those international markets.
Getting Real About Growth
Despite all these challenges, it’s worth noting that India’s economy has been growing at over 8% in the three years since COVID. That’s impressive by any standard. But Nageswaran is realistic about the future.
“Obviously, in the current environment, sustaining an 8% growth rate is going to be a very tall order. But if we can maintain growth rates of even 6.5% on a sustainable basis over the next decade or two and look to opportunistically increase it to over 7% by focusing on domestic deregulation, that will be the way to go,” he said.
Even the UN’s trade body thinks India will grow at 6.5% in 2025—not bad when much of the world is facing economic headwinds.
As I was reading about all this, I couldn’t help but think about the enormity of what India is trying to accomplish. Creating 80 lakh jobs every year while balancing technological change, global economic shifts, and the needs of 1.4 billion people is a staggering challenge. Whether they can pull it off will determine not just India’s future but likely influence global economic patterns for decades to come. It’s definitely something worth keeping an eye on.
