The contradictions in India’s development story.
Here, I would separate two issues:
India’s cultural relationship with the past and
The economic question of whether India is creating enough productive work for its young people.
Beginning with the first issue, I would say that India does have a powerful backward-looking tendency.
Glorified history, mythology, unverified ancient achievements, glorious kings, and civilizational greatness—these are constantly invoked. There is nothing inherently wrong with being proud of the past. The problem begins when memory substitutes for imagination.
A civilization can spend enormous energy saying:
“Look what we were.”
And asking less often:
“What are we going to become? What does the future hold for us?”
On another level, mythology makes this even more complicated. That is because myth, religion, history, and cultural memory are often discussed as though they were interchangeable. They aren’t. Mythology can be enormously valuable culturally without being treated as a literal historical record.
This can be dangerous, if not disastrous. The past becomes a source of psychological compensation. If the present is frustrating, glory in the past makes us feel that we are already great.
But past greatness doesn’t manufacture anything today.
The second issue:
GDP is an aggregate number. People don’t live inside GDP. They live inside households.
There is no doubt that India’s economy is growing. It has to because the ball has been set to roll. Even if the GDP becomes a $10 trillion, $20 trillion, or $30 trillion economy, and a large proportion of young people cannot find productive, reasonably paid work, something fundamental is missing.
And this is where manufacturing matters.
Manufacturing has an extraordinary economic characteristic: it can create large employment ecosystems.
One factory doesn’t merely employ the people on its payroll.
It can create demand for:
component manufacturers
transporters
machinists
electricians
maintenance workers
packaging companies
designers
warehouse workers
software and automation specialists
logistics companies
local services
That is why a genuine industrial ecosystem can transform a region.
A shiny factory building by itself isn’t industrialization.
Industrialisation is an ecosystem.
In India, there has been considerable expansion in areas such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics, chemicals, engineering goods, and some high-tech manufacturing.
The deeper problem is scale and breadth.
India needs millions of productive jobs, particularly for people who aren’t going to become software engineers, MBAs, or government employees.
And that means:
India needs labor-intensive manufacturing as well as capital-intensive manufacturing.
A highly automated factory producing with 500 employees can be technologically impressive.
But if 10 million young people are entering the workforce, it doesn’t solve the employment problem.
You need industries capable of absorbing people.
Textiles. Footwear. Furniture. Food processing. Electronics assembly. Auto components. Machinery. Construction materials. Consumer goods.
Then, as workers become more skilled, the economy moves progressively toward higher-value manufacturing.
That is how countries such as China, South Korea, and earlier Japan transformed their economies.
Another uncomfortable issue: India’s obsession with “big numbers.”
We love announcing:
$5 trillion economy.
$10 trillion economy.
$30 trillion economy.
But the more meaningful questions are
How much does the average Indian produce?
How many young Indians have productive employment?
How much does an Indian worker earn?
How sophisticated are our exports?
How many globally competitive companies do we create?
How much value do we manufacture rather than merely consume or assemble?
How good are our schools at producing capable human beings?
Those questions are much harder.
And therefore they are less attractive politically.
India’s real challenge isn’t simply “growth.”
It is ‘structural transformation.’
A poor country, i.e., a country with low per capita income, normally has large numbers of people working in the low-productivity agriculture sector.
Development means moving people progressively from:
agriculture → manufacturing → sophisticated manufacturing/services
Here productivity rises at every stage.
The digital era with computers has allowed India to leapfrog remarkably far into the services sector.
And here is the catch.
A software engineer can generate enormous economic value.
But you cannot employ hundreds of millions of moderately educated Indians as software engineers.
That’s why manufacturing remains so important.
A country needs a story about its future.
Not merely:
“We were once magnificent.”
And not merely:
“Our GDP will reach X trillion dollars.”
It needs something like
Here is what an Indian born in 2035 will be capable of.
Here is what India will manufacture.
Here is what India will invent.
Here is what an ordinary Indian worker will earn.
Here is what our cities will look like.
Here is what our schools will produce.
Here is how we will become indispensable to the world.
That’s a national vision.
And frankly, GDP is a consequence of that vision—not the vision itself.
One final thought.
I wouldn’t characterize Indians as always living in the past. India is also one of the world’s most ambitious and entrepreneurial societies.
The contradiction is that India can be extraordinarily future-oriented economically while being extraordinarily past-oriented culturally and politically.
Both things can coexist.
And perhaps the conversation worth having is:
Can India use the confidence of its past without becoming imprisoned by it?
Because the greatest tribute to a civilization isn’t endlessly talking about what its ancestors achieved.
It is creating something that future generations will remember us for.