India stands at a crossroads. With a population of 1.4 billion, the world’s fifth-largest economy, and a geopolitical moment that creates the potential for it to be a preferred destination for investment flowing away from China, the country has rarely faced such a confluence of opportunity and peril. A generation after liberali-zation transformed its economy, India is again confronting a turning point shaped by artificial intelligence, fractured globalization, climate risk, youth unemploy-ment, rising inequality, and a changing world order. This ambitious collection of-fers an assessment of where India stands and what it must do next and examines India’s development journey from the early decades of planning and the command-ing role of the state, through the liberalization of the 1990s, to the unresolved di-lemmas of today’s lower-middle-income market economy.
Threading through contributions from leading economists, business leaders, and policy thinkers is a single pressing question: can India convert its demographic scale, technological capabilities, entrepreneurial energy, and geopolitical opening into a model of development that creates good jobs, expands human capabilities, strengthens institutions, and shares the gains of globalization and technology more widely?
Neither triumphalist nor despairing, The Indian Economy: Navigating a Global Turning Point delivers the rigorous, evidence-based analysis this pivotal moment demands. It is essential reading for students, scholars, policymakers, business leaders, and anyone who believes that understanding India’s economy is insepara-ble from understanding the future of the world.