---
type: faq
question: What is the Viksit Bharat Ambition? What would it take to achieve it?
topic: economic-growth
topic_title: Economic Growth
topic_url: 'https://liberty-lighthouse.vercel.app/topics/economic-growth/'
canonical_url: >-
  https://liberty-lighthouse.vercel.app/topics/economic-growth/faq/what-is-the-viksit-bharat-ambition-what-would-it-take-to-achieve-it/
markdown_url: >-
  https://liberty-lighthouse.vercel.app/topics/economic-growth/faq/what-is-the-viksit-bharat-ambition-what-would-it-take-to-achieve-it.md
---
# What is the Viksit Bharat Ambition? What would it take to achieve it?

Most of us have a rough idea of what a developed country looks like. Roads that work when it rains. Hospitals with equipment that functions. A job that pays enough to save and buy a house. The question embedded in Viksit Bharat ambition is whether we can build that country in one generation. 

Let's understand what that requires. The average Indian earns around [$2,800 a year](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/IND). The [World Bank's threshold for a high-income country](https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519) sits just above $14,000. So, we need to roughly 5x the income of an average Indian over the next two decades. If we were to grow at 6% a year the average Indian's income would 3x by 2047. That is roughly what the average Colombian earns today - well short of our developed country ambition. Growing at 8%, the minimum India's own Economic Survey says, we 4x our income and reach the living standard of an average Malaysian. Only at 10% or above, sustained across two decades, do we cross 6x — arriving at Romania's income today - the lower end of Europe. So achieving the Viksit Bharat ambition requires us to achieve 10%+ growth rate for the coming two decades. 

What separates 10% from 6% is investment. Every country that crossed the development threshold in the last century — Japan, South Korea and now China — did so by deploying capital at a pace that compressed two generations of growth into one. More factories, more machines, more workers trained to use them. Once output rose, wages followed.

In India, private investment has been slow. Part of this is factor costs. Acquiring land for a factory in India is slow and expensive. The four labour codes, though an improvement on what existed before, remain difficult for formal employers to navigate. Environmental clearances for large projects can stretch into years. Each adds cost and time before a single unit of production happens. An investor comparing India to Vietnam does this arithmetic — and sometimes writes the cheque to Vietnam instead. The other part is the legal system. When a commercial contract breaks down in India, [resolving it through the courts takes over four years on average](https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/data/exploreeconomies/india#DB_ec). An investor who cannot enforce a contract quickly either avoids it or prices the risk into what they charge. Either way, less investment, at a higher cost. 

But at the core is something that is hard to put in a policy document. For most of the decades since independence, the Indian state's default relationship with business has been one of suspicion — inspectors, licensing requirements, the assumption of guilt until proven otherwise. The 1991 reforms changed the regulation, but culture is harder to change with a stoke of pen. A state that treats every enterprise as a potential wrongdoer does not attract capital at the pace Viksit Bharat requires. Hence the shift needed is not just simpler laws but a different relationship between government and those trying to build things.

None of this is new. The same barriers were named before 1991. The crisis of that year forced us to act on them. The reforms that followed were real. But they were also unfinished. Becoming a Viksit Bharat does not need a new idea. It needs us to finish what we started.  But does a rising average reach everyone — or does it mostly pull ahead those who were already near the top?