Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on why India is on track to surpass its $5-trillion economy goal

It is certainly that time of the year or life of the government when you start looking forward, after looking back, and start engaging in conversations about what the future will look like based on the effort and progress made in the past 10 years. It’s a legitimate question, something that most Indians must ponder. Because, over the past 10 years, even the worst cynic on the planet will agree that India has certainly transformed in multiple ways.

There is a new political culture that is visible—a culture of performance, one that delivers. There is a governance framework that is extremely visible. It’s responsive and connected to almost every citizen using technology and innovation. And there is ambition. And, therefore, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the nation is aspiring to even more growth and greatness.

So, looking at the past 10 years and forward to this dream that was never imaginable in our lifetime before—of achieving the status of first the third-largest economy in the world and then becoming a developed nation within 100 years of independence—it is certainly something that we should understand and talk about.

I have been a minister for about two years, after the PM gave me this incredible opportunity, and I have served before that for several years as a Member of Parliament. For a large part of those years, I was in the opposition—from 2006 to 2014. I saw how, at every stage, the narrative of India would go from bad to worse. In 2014, we were classified as a fragile five country. We had tech and electronics manufacturing sectors and an innovation economy that were really hampered by a lack of leadership and support from the Government of India. Companies wanted to set up semiconductor plants in India in 2012, but the government lacked vision. Even in an area like telecom, with which I have long been associated, after 10–15 years of its existence, it was beset with scams and crony capitalism. That, in a sense, defined the rest of the digital economy as well.

If you had asked me in 2014 or 2013 what India’s future would look like, I would certainly have been disconsolate, not terribly optimistic, and reasonably shy of predicting anything, like a billion Indians. But here we are 10 years on, and if you ask me now to look forward to any of the segments that I am associated with—technology, electronics, manufacturing, innovation, semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), talent, and skills in areas like higher education—I can tell you in a nutshell that I am deeply optimistic about us going from the fifth-largest economy to becoming the third-largest in a very short time.

The digital economy used to contribute about 4.5% of the GDP in 2014, but is set to be about 20% or a fifth of the GDP, by 2026. And we’re focussed on the goal of helping the digital economy touch $1 trillion by around 2026-27. There’s also the larger goal of making India a $5-trillion economy by that time. I think we are on course for that. The past few years in particular—the investments made in semiconductors, electronics, the PLI (Production Linked Incentive) scheme, and SPECS (Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors), in AI, and the strategic partnerships that the PM has drawn up with the US, Japan, South Korea, and the EU—these are all building blocks to what will be a trillion-plus digital economy in the coming years.

In this term, the government was beset with almost two and a half years of massive disruption in the Covid-19 pandemic. So, really, if you look at a report card and extrapolate it over the last five years based on those two and a half years of productive growth that we had, and you then extrapolate that to the next five years, I think we can all safely assume that we will grow at significantly high rates. We can grow at 8 per cent or more easily in the coming five years. And that will take us very close to the goal of Viksit Bharat that the PM has set out.

In terms of the innovation ecosystem, which has about 100,000-plus start-ups and 111-odd unicorns, I see that by the time the next decade is out, the next wave of start-ups that are going to come are going to be intellectual property-driven, device-product-driven, and are going to come from semiconductors, electronic systems, quantum computing, high-performance computing, and AI. So I have no hesitation in saying that the goal that we are working towards is about 1 million start-ups and almost 10,000 unicorns in the next decade.

The long and short of most of the conversation in tech today is a growing acknowledgement from the world that India will be among the nations that will shape the future of technology and innovation and be the provider of the most critical raw material—talent.

We are absolutely focussed on the PM’s mission and vision that in areas like AI, semiconductors, Web 3, high-performance computing, quantum computing, scientific research, and adjacent areas, the talent that will propel and power the future decade of innovation—the India Techade of innovation—will be of high quality, globally competitive, hard-charging, and will come from Indian institutions.

I have been in the tech industry for three and a half decades. As a veteran Indian techie, I can say that this is certainly the most exciting time to be in Indian tech. It is certainly the most exciting time to be a young Indian in the history of independent India, and I see only an absolutely limitless future for the growth of our economy, our technology, and our innovation economy. I see the force, this very ambivalent and shy India, this underperforming India that was a narrative pre-2014, transforming steadily in the last 10 years and certainly definitely in the next 10 years into an unstoppable force and unstoppable India. We will end up with Viksit Bharat, a developed India for future generations.

As told to Nidhi Singal. The author is Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship; Electronics and Information Technology; and Ministry of Jal Shakti. Views are personal