MUMBAI: India could emerge as the world’s second largest economy by 2031 and the largest economy by 2060, riding on a stable investment rate, macroeconomic and financial stability, favourable demographics and growth multipliers like digitisation, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) deputy governor Michael Patra said on Friday.
The role of monetary policy will be crucial in navigating India’s inflation rate with global levels, which will help preserve both the internal and external value of rupee, Patra said in a speech at the mid-career training programme for officials of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie.
“Price stability is the best contribution that monetary policy can make to strengthen the foundations of the aspired trajectory of growth over the next few decades. The formation of inflation in India needs to be navigated towards convergence with global inflation so that both the internal and external value of the rupee is preserved. This will prepare the ground for the internationalisation of the rupee and the emergence of India as the economic powerhouse of the world of tomorrow,” Patra said in a speech titled ‘Future Readying India’s Monetary Policy’.
It has been estimated that if India can grow at 9.6% per annum in next 10 years, it will break free of the shackles of the lower middle income trap and become a developed economy, he said.
In purchasing power parity terms – which is the price of an average basket of goods and services in each country – India is already the third largest economy in the world, Patra said.
“The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development projects that in PPP terms India will overtake the US by 2048 to become the second-largest economy of the world,” he said. “To paraphrase from Victor Hugo, there is nothing more powerful than a country whose time has come. The age of Japan started in the 1960s and lasted up to the 1980s. The age of China began in the early 1990s, taking it to the position of the second largest economy of the world. It is from 2010 that India’s time has come.”
