India may be heading towards ‘superpower’ status, but Raghuram Rajan believes that there is still work to be done. The former RBI Governor opined during a recent podcast that the country had perhaps ’30 years of work’ ahead of it.
“We should have ambition, we should dream of the world, but we should have a possibility of reaching them, and for that we have to do the homework. You can’t dream and say we are there because we’re not. This is the problem I see when we constantly think that we are already a superpower. We’re not. We can get there. We will probably get there if we do the right things, but we’re still a long way from there,” he told Kushal Lodha.
‘Job for next 30 years’
Rajan noted that there was a long and rather arduous road ahead of the country — outlining a ’30-year job’ required to build the nation.
“We will probably get there if we do the right things, but we’re still a long way from there. And that means working every day where wherever you are, whether you’re in the armed forces, whether you’re in the civilian population, whether you’re in academia, whether you are a doctor…I mean…building India is a job that we have to continue doing for the next 30 years before we can relax a little bit. And that’s where the aspiration is important,” he added.
Key challenges for Indian economy
‘Clearly growth is strong. The numbers need to be looked at a little carefully because some of the growth comes from what is called the GDP deflator. We have relatively moderate growth in GDP in rupee terms. But because inflation is really low…it boosts what is called the real growth. Now how much of that is because of the way we calculate the deflator is something economists deliberate all the time…but certainly relative to many other big countries…we are growing fast. Of course we’re growing fast partly because we are one of the poorer countries but you shouldn’t diminish the fact that a lot of this is because we are in fact doing the right things,” he opined.