Can India Become a High-Income Economy by 2047?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]So the India of today is ready to take on the future and uh let's uh actually break down what uh Punam Gupta the deputy governor of the RBI had said at Colombia University last month and this her speech was uploaded on the RBI website on the 11th of May this month and uh really she spoke about India's per capita income growth trajectory and uh the per capita income has risen 10x since 1981. 1 and it's reached it was about $274 at that time. It's reached $2,700 in 2024. That's a 10x rise and clearly that income has grown 5x over the last two decades. Uh signaling that there is a strong momentum. The first you know for the f it doubled it took 20 years to double but over the next uh 20 years it has basically reasoned five times. So it's clearly rising much faster now. And the IMF projection projects per capita income at around 3,51 in 2026 and uh going forward to about 4,346 by 2030. So there is clearly that trajectory is going up and uh you know she goes on to talk more about that. uh there is been uh this is of course largely because of India's GDP growth and GDP has been rising at about 6% to between 8%. Uh from let's say from the mid80s onwards and then much faster after the liberalization of the 1990s but clearly that has set the economy on a fast growth trajectory but the per capita income growth has grown faster.

[00:01:44]So that is a sign that you know perhaps the population is stabilizing the the economy is uh the per capita people are people's incomes are increasing more rapidly and uh the result is that this there's a significant shift in fact in income growth from 2010 onwards you know from uh it was a strong there was strong divergence actually between the states and all the different states but that has coming is coming down from 2010 onwards. Move on to our next slide please.

[00:02:15]So this is talking about the state's GD GSDP uh and also this plays a part in the per capita income of course because India is a union of states but uh some of the states were growing much faster than others. Those