By Anup Roy
India’s economy can approach $20 trillion by 2046 if it continues growing at its current pace, a top government official said, putting it in reach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of becoming a developed nation.
The economy doesn’t need “heroic assumptions” to meet that target, Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran said in an opinion piece in Mint newspaper on Tuesday. If real growth averages 7% a year over the coming decade, and US inflation is about 3%, then the growth rate in dollar terms will be 10% a year, he estimated. The economy needs to expand at about 9.3% a year to achieve developed nation status by 2047, he said.
Nageswaran was responding to a Bloomberg News article on Aug. 30, which cited economists saying that at India’s current pace of growth, the economy would fail to meet Modi’s goal. The chief economic adviser pointed out that the appropriate measure to focus on was the dollar-denominated growth rate, rather than the real growth rate.
India’s economy expanded at an average annual rate of 8.8% in dollar terms between 2000 and 2024, compared with 6.3% when measured in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Nageswaran.
Gross domestic product of about $20 trillion by 2046 is still lower than the $30 trillion threshold that government think tank Niti Aayog estimates is needed for India to be considered a developed economy. To achieve that status, India needs per capita income of $18,000, according to the think tank, compared with $2,813 in 2025.
Nageswaran said net foreign direct investment, job creation and savings and investment rates are “real constraints” on growth, although they represent room for improvement rather than a limit on India’s potential.
India remains one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies, with data this week showing GDP expanded 7.8% from a year earlier in the April-June quarter.
In a video message after the GDP data, Modi hailed the economy’s stellar performance, while at the same time urging Indians to avoid buying gold unnecessarily, cut down on foreign trips and weddings abroad and buy products that are made in India.
