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The Hindu
5 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
India 2047: Growth Dreams Built on Shaky Human Capital
Published : Aug 05, 2025 21:51 IST - 3 MINS READ In his August 2023 Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: 'In 2047, when the country celebrates 100 years of independence, my country will be a developed India.' In July 2024, Martin Wolf of Financial Times referred to Modi's quote and wrote: 'Is [this] aspiration a feasible one? Yes. Is it a plausible one? No.' Wolf went on to compare India with Greece, which is the poorest country that the IMF ranks as 'advanced': 'If [India's] GDP per head were to match that of Greece by 2047, the rate of growth would need to rise to 7.5 per cent a year.' But, as the economist Ashoka Mody writes in our Cover Story, once statistical irregularities are stripped away, many economists estimate India's real GDP to be hovering around 4-5 per cent only. More importantly, even if India were to match the US itself in economic output (GDP) and purchasing power parity, numbers achievable by India's sheer size, it would still lag in overall productivity, technology, and human development. This is the blind spot the government deliberately refuses to acknowledge. Or address. Thus, what makes the superpower dream feasible is India's human capital, its vast sea of people. What makes it implausible is India's continuing neglect of its human capital. As the economist Dani Rodrik argued, India fell behind countries like China, Vietnam, and South Korea not because of a lack of ambition, but because sustained growth requires structural transformation, including jobs moving from agriculture to manufacturing. In India, manufacturing accounts for just 12 per cent of employment while agricultural employment is, worryingly, rising. A Harvard Kennedy School paper shows South Korea's manufacturing jobs falling in 1989, when its per capita income was almost $8,000, while India's manufacturing jobs began to drop in 2002, when its per capita income was less than $900. Thus, alarmingly, India had begun to de-industrialise long before per capita incomes were anywhere close to global standards. And nothing was created to replace those manufacturing jobs. In his interview to Frontline, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan speaks of multilevel responses: 'We can create many more jobs, but for that we need skill building.' And that is the point Mody makes too, when he writes that without mass education leading to more jobs and higher productivity, and a focus on more women in the workforce leading to generational continuity, sustained economic growth (to push India into the 'developed' category) is just not possible. Ironically, it took a comment by the pesky Donald Trump characterising India as a 'dead economy' to initiate sudden parliamentary attention on the subject. The Prime Minister's ambition of India becoming a global superpower by 2047 is laudable, but it will need his government to rapidly upgrade the country's education and health levels to global standards. This is unlikely to happen because of the Hindutva vision that necessarily drives his policy decisions. Ideological compulsions make the BJP a reactionary force, more interested in romanticising the past than in crafting a new future. Look at the sharp rise in the country of an unscientific temper, the eagerness to replace history with mythology, science with mysticism, knowledge with piety. Allowing ideology to creep into the very essentials that ensure the enhancement of human capital can only push India backwards. A superpower is not built on abstract (and massaged) GDP numbers alone. It needs a foundation that guarantees high-quality education, health, and jobs. It needs a scaffolding of administrative efficiency and judicial responsibility. It needs a vision that believes in equality and inclusive growth. None of these prerequisites are in sight yet.
CNA
05-07-2025
- Business
- CNA
Commentary: Whose job is safe from AI?
LONDON: As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? 'I've sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,' the FT's chief economics commentator Martin Wolf recently confessed. That seemed right. There are some things the computers just can't do. The next morning the FT published The Gardens That AI Grew, describing intelligently automated drip irrigation, pest detectors, laser scarecrow systems and a solar-powered weeding robot. Oof. It's not entirely clear how much the laser scarecrow and the robot weeder really will threaten the jobs of human gardeners, but the prospect reminds us that there is a distinction between a job and a task. Most jobs are bundles of interconnected tasks. A gardener needs to do everything from mowing and weeding to diagnosing a pest infestation, designing an outdoor space, or – hardest of all – communicating with a difficult client. Different AI systems could well help with most of these tasks, although the likely outcome is not that the job of gardener disappears, but that it changes shape. The question is, how will each new AI application change the shape of what we do? And will we like the reworked jobs available to us on the other side of this transformation? TECHNOLOGY, BOTH OLD AND NEW Generative AI may be new but these questions are not. They run all the way back to the Luddite protests of the early 1800s, when highly skilled textile workers saw machines doing the hardest parts of their job, allowing them to be replaced by low-paid labourers with far less expertise. And the answers to those long-standing questions? They depend both on the technology and on the job. There's a lesson to be drawn from two contrasting precedents: the digital spreadsheet, and warehouse guidance earpieces such as the 'Jennifer unit'. The digital spreadsheet, which hit the market in 1979, instantly and flawlessly performed work previously done by accounting clerks, but the accounting profession simply moved on to more strategic and creative problems, modelling different scenarios and risks. Who doesn't want a creative accountant? The Jennifer unit is a headset to guide warehouse pickers as they scurry around grabbing merchandise off shelves, whispering in their ears as it tracks their last move and guides their next one. The unit removes the last vestige of cognitive load from a physically demanding job that was already mind-numbing. It is a stark contrast to the digital spreadsheet, which excised the most tedious part of a varied and highly skilled job. The lesson: AI can make a boring job even more boring and an interesting job even more interesting. New data and a new perspective on these questions come from MIT researchers David Autor and Neil Thompson. Autor and Thompson begin a new research paper titled 'Expertise' by posing a question: would we expect accounting clerks and inventory clerks to be similarly affected by automation? There are several well-established approaches to analysing this question, and all of them suggest that the answer is 'yes'. Back in the day, both types of clerk spent a lot of time performing routine intellectual tasks such as spotting discrepancies, compiling inventories or tables of data, and doing simple arithmetic on a large scale. All of these tasks were the kind of things that computers could do, and as computers became cheap enough they took over. Given the same tasks faced the same sort of automation, it seems logical that both jobs would change in similar ways. THE JOBS AI CAN DO, AND CAN'T But that is not what happened. In particular, say Autor and Thompson, wages for accounting clerks rose, while wages for inventory clerks fell. This is because most jobs are not random collections of unrelated tasks. They are bundles of tasks that are most efficiently done by the same person for a variety of unmysterious reasons. Remove some tasks from the bundle and the rest of the job changes. Inventory clerks lost the bit of the job requiring most education and training (the arithmetic) and became more like shelf-stackers. Accounting clerks also lost the arithmetic, but what remained required judgment, analysis and sophisticated problem solving. Although the same kind of tasks had been automated away, the effect was to make inventory clerking a job requiring less training and less expertise, while accounting clerks needed to be more expert than before. The natural worry for anyone hoping to have a job in five years' time is what AI might do to that job. And while there are few certainties, Autor and Thompson's framework does suggest a clarifying question: does AI look like it is going to do the most highly skilled part of your job or the low-skill rump that you've not been able to get rid of? The answer to that question may help to predict whether your job is about to get more fun or more annoying – and whether your salary is likely to rise, or fall as your expert work is devalued like the expert work of the Luddites. For example, generative AI systems are great brainstormers. They make unexpected connections and produce lots of varied ideas. When I'm running a role-playing game, that's great. They accelerate the preparation and let me get straight to the good stuff, which is sitting around the table with my friends pretending to be wizards. For someone whose job offers occasional oases of creative brainstorming in a desert of menial administration, the emergence of industrial brainstorming engines might be rather less liberating. Or consider that gardener. Perhaps the worst part of their job is trying to compose emails to desk-based clients who seem far more fluent in the medium than someone who spends most of their time outside. Laser scarecrows and robot weeders be damned. What the gardener needs is an AI secretary, scribe and editor. And the technology for that is already here.
NDTV
26-06-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Developed Or Upper-Middle Income? Top Economist Visualises India At 2047
New Delhi: The goal of making India a developed country by 2047, is "plausible" if the economy stays to the current growth rate of 6 per cent, economist Martin Wolf told NDTV in an exclusive interview today. If the growth rate goes slightly higher, the climb might be easier, he said. "I have always felt India could grow at 8 per cent a year. And if that happened, you would definitely become developed". But even with maintaining the current growth rate - which would involve pushing skilling of young workers, expanding education and increasing participation of women in the work force -- it is an achievable goal, said the chief economics commentator for Financial Times, London, who received the Commander of the British Empire award in 2000 "for services to financial journalism". But there is a caveat. During his ongoing visit in Delhi, Mr Wolf said staying on an even course might not push India into a textbook definition of "developed" but it would still be very well off and "sophisticated". The definition of a "developed country", he said, varies. "In my definitions, that wouldn't really make India a developed nation. But that's a matter of division," he added. But it would still be "an upper-middle-income country... a considerably bigger economy and more sophisticated than today. So does it matter, it wouldn't be precisely a developed country as I define it?" he added. "I expect it to be very clearly the third-largest economy in the world and a great power. That should happen, simply the combination of numbers with growth continuing at about the average, which is very much consistent of 6 per cent a year or so, which India has had over the last three decades," Mr Wolf said.
Economic Times
25-05-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
For fake's sake, get real: The grand industrial complex of digital deception
An iconic cartoon in The New Yorker in 1993 depicted a dog perched at a computer, quipping to another, 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' That wit was a clever way to express online anonymity, but it has mutated into something more insidious today: a euphemism for the grand industrial complex of digital years after its publication, the cartoon fetched the highest price ever paid for a single-panel illustration, a testimony to its prophetic relevance today, when identity, opinion and emotion are manufactured and monetised at scale. Welcome to a dangerous epoch where AI is much more than a nuisance-it is a geopolitical and corporate threat. Bot farms now produce vast networks of virtual personas that mirror human behaviour with accuracy. These bots aren't just liking, sharing or retweeting. They are fabricating entire digital lives: posting photos, forming networks, engaging in debates and endorsing ideologies or products. This shift in influence has triggered a crisis of credibility. Take the case of TikTok. With over 1.5 bn users globally, its algorithmic content discovery engine rewards virality. Before it was banned in India, TikTok had over 20 crore users. The app was designed to amplify content regardless of provenance and was an ideal conduit for bot-driven have bot networks morphed into powerful digital armies? Professional outfits run these operations, employing thousands to manage millions of fake accounts that have curated timelines, believable comment histories and even AI-generated profile are grave implications for India Inc. Here are 4 strategic inflection points leading to unprecedented vulnerabilities: Manipulable info markets: When a significant portion of online sentiment can be manufactured, traditional indicators of brand health become unreliable. An FMCG brand might see a sudden dip in social media sentiment and initiate a costly PR or rebranding campaign, only to discover it was the target of a bot-driven smear effort. It costs little to contract a for-rent bot attack service, but it costs a great deal to defend against one. This asymmetric cost structure means even small players can distort markets. Vendors in eastern Europe offer armies of bots for as little as Rs 15,000 per campaign, whereas cybersecurity audits, reputation management firms or legal action will cost crores. Conflicting incentives: Platforms benefit from engagement metrics, and they don't care about authenticity. This creates an environment where platforms cannot be trusted as objective sources of market information. Disappearing control: The story of Martin Wolf from FT being impersonated online is something many Indians resonate with. Recently, RBI flagged over 600 fake finance apps using AI-generated personas to lure users into scams. Reputational collapse: Recently, a leading tech firm saw a viral video falsely attributed to its HR head denigrating job applicants. The AI-generated deepfake video was amplified by bots. Despite a rebuttal, the reputational damage was done, investors panicked, share prices dipped and clients demanded clarifications. Globally, governments are waking up. The EU's Digital Services Act is a step in the right direction. But what of India? While the proposed Digital India Act begins to address digital harms, it is yet to fully comprehend the menace of industrialised artificial sentiment.A fundamental restructuring of how organisations gather and validate market intelligence is imminent. The existing social media platforms will be viewed as compromised sources of strategic information. There will be a rise in verified information ecosystems, which could emerge from existing platforms implementing stronger verification, or as entirely new environments built with authentication as a core privacy concerns must be balanced with the need for reliable information. Cultural differences in attitudes toward identity verification will create uneven adoption. But the strategic imperative is clear: organisations need reliable intelligence to make sound decisions.A possible solution is universal digital identity verification. India is uniquely positioned to pioneer this approach, thanks to Aadhaar. Could a parallel digital identity framework be implemented for social media? This wouldn't remove anonymity but would enable tiered verification where platforms cryptographically verify that a user is human, without disclosing their actual identity unless warranted by law. Anonymity must coexist with could lead the way. Imagine an ecommerce platform that only allows verified reviews from Aadhaar-linked accounts. Or a fintech company that measures sentiment from authenticated communities instead of X hashtags. These aren't Orwellian visions, but pragmatic responses to a world where truth is hard to a democratised UPI, India's digital journey proves that scalable, secure and citizen-centric infrastructure is achievable. To ignore the rise of artificial sentiment is to invite chaos into our decision-making frameworks. For India Inc, the moment to act is not tomorrow or next quarter. It is now. Because in the age of digital deception, only authenticity will endure.
South China Morning Post
23-05-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
For central bankers, gold's safe-haven status has never looked better
Wall Street pundits and investors are schizophrenic about US assets . The dollar weakened after Moody's cut the United States' credit rating, citing the increasing fiscal deficit , as well as the rising interest costs on government debt. On the other hand, the S&P 500 not only recovered after US President Donald Trump's April tariff shock , but is now less than 5 per cent off its record high in February. Nevertheless, 30-year US Treasury yields recently exceeded 5 per cent per annum, indicating investors' nervousness about US deficits and debt sustainability. While Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf worries about Trump's assault on the US dollar, he and others argue that there is no suitable alternative to the dollar. I beg to disagree. Wolf listed some alternatives, such as replacing the US dollar with the Chinese renminbi or the euro, a world with multiple competing currencies or continuing the dollar status quo. Wolf also mentioned the possibility of a global currency or even a cryptocurrency-based world, but dismissed both as inconceivable. I agree that fiat currencies are not serious alternatives to the dollar, since the euro is a weak second; the Japanese yen and renminbi are not even close contenders. A global currency, perhaps based on the International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights , is a pipe dream. Rival powers are unable to agree on a global central bank. The US has a de facto veto on any IMF reforms that would allow for expanded special drawing rights. And even though cryptocurrencies have reportedly reached US$1.5 trillion in market value and bitcoin rose above US$100,000 after the tariff shock, most people would not be able to access cryptocurrencies if a world war breaks out and internet cables are cut. If we cannot trust human governance of any monetary system, the only other historically safe store of value is gold.
