For a decade, India has been sold a seductive story: the world’s fastest-growing major economy, soon to be the third-largest, a “Vishwaguru” rising on the strength of its 8% GDP headlines.
The International Monetary Fund applauds, global investors cheer, and television anchors celebrate every upward revision as proof of an unstoppable miracle. Yet walk through any small town in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Madhya Pradesh. Ask a street vendor how demonetisation treated him in 2016, a textile worker in Tiruppur how GST compliance finished his employer, or a migrant mason in Mumbai why he never returned after the 2020 lockdown.
Their answer is the same: the miracle never arrived.
Their wages are frozen, their children are out of school, and the India that grows at 8% feels like another country.
This is the great Indian divergence: two nations living inside one border. One India—perhaps 100 million strong—shops on Amazon, flies IndiGo, and invests in mutual funds. The other India—800 million souls—still waits for the trickle that was supposed to reach them.
The first India is counted obsessively in GDP. The second has become statistically invisible.
The tragedy is not that India grows. The tragedy is that it grows in a way that deliberately excludes most Indians. Start with jobs, the original broken promise. In 2014 the Bharatiya Janata Party pledged 20 million new jobs every year. Eleven years later, the entire net addition to formal employment is roughly 15 million—less than one year’s promise.
The working-age population, meanwhile, expanded by 130 million. Do the arithmetic: India created one formal job for every nine new entrants into the labour force. The rest were pushed into selling pakodas, driving Ola without social security, or simply giving up and going home to the village.
Youth unemployment hovers above 17%, the worst in the G20. A demographic dividend is being converted, in real time, into a demographic ticking bomb. The government’s defence is always the same: look at GDP. But GDP has become the economic equivalent of a Snapchat filter—making reality look better than it is. Since the controversial 2015 base-year revision, India’s growth rate magically rose by 2–2.5 percentage points with no corresponding surge in electricity consumption, freight traffic, or bank credit to industry. When inconvenient surveys—like the 2017–18 consumption data that showed rural distress—threatened the narrative, they were buried. When the National Sample Survey Office dared to publish an unemployment rate of 6.1% in 2018—highest in 45 years—its chiefs were swiftly eased out. In India today, bad news is treated as treason.
The statistical sleight-of-hand would be comical if the consequences weren’t so grim. When the informal sector—92% of the workforce—shrinks, national accounts often register it as growth, because they use listed-company data as a proxy for the whole economy.
When kirana stores close and Reliance Retail expands, GDP calls it progress. When a textile unit in Surat fires 50 workers and installs Chinese machines, GDP applauds the productivity gain. The India that suffers is simply edited out of the frame. This is not accidental. It is the logical outcome of chasing an obsolete dream: the fantasy that India can still become a manufacturing superpower by copying China’s 1990s playbook. That train left the station two decades ago. Today’s factories are run by robots, not rural migrants. Global supply chains are shortening, not lengthening. The window in which low-skill, low-wage manufacturing could absorb hundreds of millions of workers has slammed shut—everywhere, forever.
Yet Indian policy remains trapped in industrial nostalgia. Hundreds of thousands of crores are poured into production-linked incentives for semiconductors and electric vehicles—sectors that will create perhaps 200,000 direct jobs even in the most optimistic scenario.
Meanwhile, construction, light manufacturing, textiles, tourism, and agro-processing—genuine labour-absorbing sectors—are starved of credit and crushed by compliance. The government boasts of “Make in India” while quietly presiding over “Break in India.”
The damage goes deeper than missed opportunities. Three policy shocks—demonetisation, GST rollout, and the pandemic lockdown—acted like economic cluster bombs on the informal sector. Demonetisation vaporised working capital in cash-based ecosystems. A badly designed GST buried small firms under paperwork and tax terrorism. The 2020 lockdown—announced with four hours’ notice—triggered the largest reverse migration since Partition.
Even today, millions of construction workers have not returned to cities. The scars are permanent: shattered supply chains, broken trust, depleted household savings. GDP may have rebounded on paper, but the real economy is still limping. And still the obsession with headline growth continues. It is sustained by a toxic alliance: politicians who need a feel-good narrative, bureaucrats who fear posting unfavourable numbers, and international institutions like the IMF that reproduce government data without independent verification. The result is an echo chamber where 8% growth is treated as proof of success even as malnutrition indicators worsen and female labour-force participation collapses to South Asian lows.
There is another path, and it is hiding in plain sight.
India already possesses the building blocks of a twenty-first-century knowledge economy: the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem, the cheapest data in the world, a universal payments interface that stunned even Silicon Valley, and a diaspora that dominates global tech. The same digital public infrastructure that delivered vaccines to a billion people in record time can deliver education, healthcare, and financial inclusion to the excluded 800 million.The future does not lie in trying to out-factory Vietnam. It lies in out-thinking the world.
Imagine redirecting even half the subsidies currently showered on capital-intensive industries into universal foundational learning, digital literacy, and vocational skilling. Imagine using the same Aadhaar-UPI backbone to create portable social security for gig workers and a national platform connecting rural artisans directly to global consumers. Imagine regulating platforms not to protect incumbents but to force them to share data wealth with the workers who generate it. None of this requires inventing new technology. It requires political courage to abandon the comforting twentieth-century script and write a new one suited to India’s actual strengths.
Until that happens, the growth mirage will continue. Television studios will keep celebrating 8% while village chaupals discuss which son should migrate to the Gulf next. The IMF will keep forecasting sunshine while children faint in government schools from hunger.
The central lie of the past decade is that GDP growth automatically translates into development. The truth is simpler and more brutal: growth that deliberately leaves 800 million people behind is not growth. It is extraction disguised as progress.
India stands at a civilisational fork. One road is paved with press conferences, revised data series, and ever-higher GDP projections that mean nothing on the ground. The other road is harder: it demands honest numbers, massive investment in human capability, and a growth model that puts decent work before stock-market applause.
History will not judge us by how fast we grew on paper. It will judge us by whether we used this brief democratic moment to give 800 million Indians a reason to believe that tomorrow can be better than today.
The numbers can lie. The people cannot be fooled forever.
(Satish Jha is a former Chief of Research, Financial Express, Co-founder of Jansatta and Editor of Dinamaan, a weekly of The Times of India Group until 1989 and worked with Fortune 100 companies internationally in CXO roles)
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ब्रेकिंग न्यूज और लाइव न्यूज अपडेट के लिए हमें फेसबुक पर लाइक करें या ट्विटर पर फॉलो करें। Pavitra India पर विस्तार से पढ़ें मनोरंजन की और अन्य ताजा-तरीन खबरें
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