{"id":319643,"date":"2026-03-08T21:06:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T21:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/319643\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T21:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T21:06:10","slug":"indias-economy-is-booming-but-uneven-growth-clouds-ascent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/319643\/","title":{"rendered":"India’s economy is booming, but uneven growth clouds ascent"},"content":{"rendered":"

But over the past decade they have given way to centres that allow firms to tap top-tier talent and technology, where white-collar staff perform tasks ranging from IT and data analytics to innovation and design.<\/p>\n

Today, these centres are the shiniest parts of India’s red-hot economy but not everyone has been able to enjoy the boom times as opportunities remain uneven.<\/p>\n

Amazon’s biggest office in the world is now located in southern India, and top financiers like JPMorgan have roughly 20 percent of their workforce scattered across Indian cities.<\/p>\n

The government says the country is now home to about one-fifth of the world’s chip design engineers, helped by hiring from firms like Qualcomm and MediaTek.<\/p>\n

This has boosted services sector growth and helped make India the fastest-growing major economy — a title it has firmly held onto since 2021.<\/p>\n

\"High-rise<\/p>\n

High-rise buildings under construction in Mumbai \u00a9 Punit PARANJPE \/ AFP\/File <\/p>\n

Alouk Kumar, the head of an Indian consultancy that helps global giants set up offshore business centres, says his phone hasn’t stopped buzzing in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

“Demand and interest have been crazy… the number of calls I have got from European firms has soared,” he said. “The way it is increasing, the next 10 years will belong to India.”<\/p>\n

The surge in growth saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government declare in December that India had overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.<\/p>\n

But figures last month indicate the announcement was premature, with the crossover unlikely to happen for at least another year.<\/p>\n

Still, economists say the eventual switch will represent a landmark achievement — less than three decades ago, Japan was the second-largest economy in the world, and India was still struggling to dismantle its quasi-socialist economic system.<\/p>\n

Market reforms in the 1990s unlocked an eventual $283 billion software\u2011services industry, while a credit boom in the 2000s helped the country’s biggest conglomerates expand globally.<\/p>\n

And since 2014, a huge infrastructure drive — new highways, airports and ports — has underpinned swift growth.<\/p>\n

“India’s feat cannot be trivialised,” said Dhiraj Nim, an economist at ANZ Research. <\/p>\n

Many countries, he noted, “failed to capitalise” on similar opportunities or “squandered them in the face of global shocks and imprudent policies”.<\/p>\n

\"Wage-labourers<\/p>\n

Wage-labourers under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act work at a road-construction site at Balapur Dolkarpada village in Maharashtra’s Palghar district \u00a9 Indranil Mukherjee \/ AFP <\/p>\n

This world-beating growth — India’s economy roughly doubles in size every decade, compared to Japan, which has basically flatlined — has helped transform the country.<\/p>\n

Poverty, for instance, has fallen.<\/p>\n

The World Bank estimates the share of Indians living on $4.20 or less per day plunged from 57.7 percent in 2011\u201312, to 23.9 percent in 2022\u201323.<\/p>\n

Slowly rising incomes have also led to the emergence of a middle class, estimated at over 300 million.<\/p>\n

– ‘Illusion’ – <\/p>\n

But experts caution that the gains from rapid expansion remain wildly uneven.<\/p>\n

“There are still a lot of youngsters who are left behind by the progress of our economy,” said Amit Saxena of Ambe International.<\/p>\n

The firm sends thousands of blue-collar workers overseas each year in search of regular, better paid work.<\/p>\n

Nearly half of India’s population also continues to rely on agriculture for subsistence.<\/p>\n

That keeps GDP per capita far below that of other major economies — it is 12 times smaller than Japan’s and 20 times smaller than Germany’s.<\/p>\n

“India’s economic growth is largely fuelled by demand from the top 100 million people,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A “significant portion of India’s workforce remains in relatively low-productivity and informal sectors”, says Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University \u00a9 Indranil Mukherjee \/ AFP <\/p>\n

He added that a “significant portion of India’s workforce remains in relatively low-productivity and informal sectors”.<\/p>\n

Chakravorti traces the gaping wage hole to India’s services-driven growth, which supports a “narrower slice” of the population, in contrast to China’s manufacturing-led boom.<\/p>\n

Most economists say India needs sustained eight percent annual growth for two decades to become a high\u2011income country. <\/p>\n

But in the near term, they warn, the priority is creating quality jobs for the millions entering the labour force each year.<\/p>\n

Analysts at Morgan Stanley believe India will require an average GDP growth rate of 12.2 percent to truly tackle underemployment.<\/p>\n

Shifting workers from farms to factories is central to that goal. <\/p>\n

While India has attracted firms like Apple to assemble iPhones, it is far from having become a manufacturing powerhouse.<\/p>\n

In rural parts of Maharashtra state, the gulf between national headlines and reality feels stark.<\/p>\n

Nitin Gaikwad, 32, supplements his meagre farm income by laying roads, under a government jobs scheme meant to provide guaranteed work at fixed wages.<\/p>\n

“I don’t see any progress anywhere. If they are saying this, it is only in the cities, where there are metros and flights,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It is an illusion that the country is progressing. The villages have remained untouched.”<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2026 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But over the past decade they have given way to centres that allow firms to tap top-tier talent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-319643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}