Shikha Mukerjee | Modi's guarantees' on India's growth can be a mind-bender

A jumble of concepts and words flood into consciousness when tasked to examine India’s growth trajectory in the 10 years since 2014, like retro punk, up the down staircase, the country prettified with silver bells and cockle shells or just plain confusing. There is no confusion when seen through the lens of US secretary of state Anthony Blinken’s effusive praise in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Conference, when he reckoned that the decade under Narendra Modi had been one of “remarkable achievements” and “materially benefitted so many Indian lives. When seen through the Prime Minister’s eyes, there is even less doubt.

India is now enveloped by “guarantees” made by the enormously popular Mr Modi that he will lead the country into the “Viksit” era. There is a subtle difference between a guarantee of Vikas, that is development as an ongoing process, and Viksit, which means advanced and developed, in other words India’s moment of arrival at its foretold destination, namely, third place in the world ranking of economies.

At the rate at which “guarantee” is being used in everyday conversations across India, the word may end up as the most used word in the world in the next 12 months in the usual listing of Word of the Year. Should that happen, it would be the result of the sheer size of the Indian population, which is now an estimated, not accurate, 1.44 billion. (No one knows how many Indians there are in the country because the last head count was 13 years ago, in 2011 when the Census happened.)

In other words, size matters. The size of India’s economy therefore is a function of the size of its population; the more the people, the larger the economy. Growing to five trillion dollars as an economy or getting third place in the world rankings is an easily achievable target. In fact, it is a low-hanging fruit.

So, what is this guarantee of arriving at Viksit Bharat after the Bharatiya Janata Party led by its charismatic leader does a hat trick third term win? In mid-2023, the assessments of various India watchers concluded that some nine states out of the total of 28 states and eight Union territories would reach “upper middle-income country” levels of Vikas. Two-thirds of the country would be wallowing somewhere between low and middle-income levels in 2030. One-third of Indians would be earning less than Rs 3 lakhs a year, while two-thirds would be earning around Rs 1.60 lakhs per capita annually. The states that will be better off, according to the statistics and programme implementation ministry by 2030 are Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Other estimates include Gujarat, Maharashtra and Haryana. There is no quibble that Uttar Pradesh, despite chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s pledge backed by Mr Modi’s guarantee of a trillion-dollar economy by 2028, and Bihar, now once again ruled by a “double-engine” sarkar, will continue to be among the poorest.

To cover the distance between Rs 1.60 lakhs to less than Rs 3 lakhs a year per capita, it is obvious that the Modi government has a bursting folder of plans to raise incomes and redeem his campaign pledge backed by a guarantee that India will arrive at the Viksit stage in a short time. So, what are in these plans?

Like all product or service guarantees, Mr Modi’s guarantees come with small print that must be painstakingly read to work out where the loopholes lie. There are promises of eradicating poverty.

There are no promises about gearing up the economy to reach full employment. With unemployment high and verifiable by the sheer desperation of lakhs of educated to take government recruitment examinations, the guarantee of growth comes with joblessness.

How then are the 800 million people, who are now covered under the distress alleviation programme of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, going to be guaranteed bare survival without free foodgrain handouts? For that to happen, the Indian economy will not only have to grow but keep growing at a phenomenal rate. That growth will have to be equitably distributed. That is not how it is now; one estimate suggests that “in India, the wealth of 16 people is equal to the wealth of 600 million people”.

From Mr Modi’s perspective, the Indian economy’s problems are rooted in its past. The Congress is, in his opinion, is responsible for holding back India’s potential and the principal agent of the country’s failure to tackle all the evils associated with poverty is Jawaharlal Nehru and the dynastic politics of the party that skimmed the cream and left the masses in dire straits. He has been scathing about Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao slogan that did nothing to eradicate poverty.

As a narrative crafted for political purposes this has worked wonders in convincing the masses that in the ten years since 2014, the country has raced ahead. Mr Modi has talked up a storm on his total sanitation programme of Swachh Bharat; he has hammered on about building housing for the poor; he gets emotional about distributing free gas cylinders to a targeted 10.35 crore poor women out of an approximate 27 crore households in India.

Two farmers’ protests in three years is a fact that contradicts the guarantee of Viksit Bharat. In an election year, the BJP’s willingness to allow farmers to sit out in protest looks like supreme confidence in the popularity of Mr Modi and his extraordinary knack of winning elections. The farm sector, which currently provides more employment than the industrial and services sector, is keeping the economy buoyant. The guarantee for Viksit Bharat that fails to negotiate a settlement with the farmers is unconvincing.

Like the minimum support price and other farm sector issues, the Modi government in its third term has to assure a rise in minimum wages to make the tryst he promises with India’s destiny as an affluent economy.

Building infrastructure that does not pay for itself, consecrating a temple, promising citizenship to some and stripping citizenship from others, does nothing for the quality of life of the poor trapped in low expectations and poverty. Elections are when voters are fully awake on how the years have treated them. If they feel that there is no escape from misery, then they will vote to maintain the status quo, because that is less risky. The obfuscation in the rhetoric of guarantees is perhaps the BJP’s mantra, because it offers a less adventurous choice.