Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to make India a developed nation. How soon can a country once synonymous with red tape become a $10 trillion economy?

India’s economic transformation is kicking into high gear.

Global manufacturers are looking beyond China, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepping up to seize the moment. The government is spending nearly 20% of its budget this fiscal year on capital investments, the most in at least a decade.

Modi is closer than any predecessor to being able to claim that the nation — which may have just passed China as the world’s most populous — is finally meeting its economic potential. To get there, he’ll have to wrestle with the drawbacks of its exceptional scale: the remnants of the red tape and corruption that has slowed India’s rise, and the stark inequality that defines the democracy of 1.4 billion people.

“India is on the cusp of huge change,” said Nandan Nilekani, a founder of Infosys Ltd., one of the nation’s largest technology services companies. India has quickly created capacity to support tens of thousands of startups, a few billion smartphones and data rates that rank among the lowest in the world, he said.

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Bloomberg Economics expects the nation’s per capita income to pull even with some developed countries in that span, putting Modi’s goal within reach. Potential GDP growth will gradually peak at about 8.5% early next decade, propelled by corporate tax cuts, incentives for manufacturers and privatization of public assets, according to BE. The Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts India to become a $10 trillion economy by 2035.

Read the full article and the referenced Cebr World Economic League Table 2023 report.