Participation is India’s problem, not growth

Channava used to earn a daily wage, cooking and selling what she could after someone else’s shift ended. A solar-powered stove and a small loan changed the arithmetic of her day — more hours to cook, a lower cost per batch, enough surplus to turn a side hustle into a business. A few villages over, Kamalavva’s sewing machine now runs on solar power too; she works faster and it costs her less in strain on her body. Anand’s forge, once at the mercy of an erratic grid, runs on the sun, and his blacksmith trade, the kind of work economists file under “informal, low-productivity, will disappear”, is instead what feeds his family.

None of these are dramatic stories. That’s the point. Viksit Bharat, India’s ambition to become a developed economy by 2047, will not be won by a few more unicorns or a couple more world-class firms. It will be won or lost in millions of small transactions like these. India’s challenge is no longer primarily to grow fast. It is to broaden who gets to participate in that growth.

That reframing changes what we should be arguing about. The first phase of India’s rise ran on liberalisation, demographics, and capital. The next phase has to run on productivity — and three forces are converging to make that possible: artificial intelligence (AI), clean and distributed energy, and digital public infrastructure. Together they could deliver India’s biggest productivity leap since 1991.

In Andhra Pradesh’s tribal highlands, roughly 1.2 lakh coffee farmers in Paderu and Araku are being brought onto a single app that handles compliance and market access, turning subsistence growers into participants in a formal, traceable supply chain. That is productivity-led growth at the bottom of the pyramid, but it required someone to build the app and the market rails. Elsewhere, AI-based farm advisory tools have pushed the cost of getting a smallholder good agronomic advice from around $35 a farmer down to under a dollar. Inclusion doesn’t trickle down from a productivity boom. It has to be engineered into it.

The second shift is from counting jobs to building livelihood systems. Ask “will AI destroy jobs” and you’re asking the wrong question — most Indians entering the workforce over the next two decades will not hold a conventional job at all. They will be entrepreneurs, gig workers, micro-manufacturers, farmers, and women running enterprises from home. In a small town in Uttar Pradesh, Vandana Yadav turned an idea and a state-backed loan into a working cold-pressed oil mill. That is not a hobby business — multiplied by tens of millions, that is what India’s employment agenda actually looks like on the ground. Mass entrepreneurship isn’t a side story to India’s growth. It is the central tale.

The third shift is geographic. The next trillion dollars of India’s GDP cannot come only from Bengaluru, Hyderabad, the NCR, and Mumbai. It has to come from district India. West Godavari’s new entrepreneurship mission, launched in the presence of the finance minister, is targeting 5,000 new enterprises and 25,000 livelihoods over five years, building on a similar effort already under way in Visakhapatnam. The district, not the metro, is the right unit for this next phase of development.

Which brings us to who actually benefits. Rekha Sen is not a banker or a bureaucrat. She’s a former self-help group member in a Rajasthan village, trained as a “Vitta Sakhi” to help other women navigate loan paperwork — and in three months she helped 15 women secure loans ranging from Rs 75,000 to Rs 5 lakh. More than 860 women like her are now doing this work across three states. This is what the idea of “women’s entrepreneurship is India’s biggest untapped growth opportunity” looks like once it stops being a line in a strategy deck. It looks like one woman helping the next one fill out a form.

None of this happens through government support alone, and it shouldn’t. Philanthropy’s job is to be India’s R&D incubator — absorbing the risk of testing what doesn’t yet work, whether that’s AI for informal workers or new models for women’s market access, so the government can scale what’s proven and markets can commercialise it. Business needs to show up as a capability builder, not a CSR donor: its supply chains, technology, and management talent are worth more to an ecosystem than a grant cheque. Civil society is the connective tissue that makes all of it reach the last village.

When historians look back on whether India actually became Viksit Bharat, they won’t be checking whether GDP crossed twenty or thirty trillion dollars. They will be asking whether Channava, and the tens of millions like her, became more productive, more prosperous, and more hopeful. Get that right, and the GDP number takes care of itself. Get it wrong, and no GDP number will matter.