Deepanshu Mohan
India’s economic ascent to a $4.2 trillion GDP in 2025 has been hailed as a historic achievement. The country is now ranked the world’s fourth largest economy by current dollar terms, surpassing Japan. From summit speeches to television debates, the triumphalist narrative hides a quieter, discomforting reality.
For a country of over 1.4 billion people, the scale of economic output should mark a turning point: better living standards, more opportunity for its citizens, and stronger government support for basic needs. But when measured against how much the average Indian earns, the picture begins to fracture.
At just $2,880, India’s per capita income lags behind much smaller economies like Vietnam ($4,810) and the Philippines ($4,350). In global terms, it ranks around 139th in per capita GDP. The average Indian earns in a year what a German earns in under a month. This is more than an income gap; it’s a gulf in life chances.
This is not just a problem of inequality but a deep-rooted pattern of systemic exclusion. The World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the top 1 percent of Indians hold over 40 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom half, over 700 million own just 5.9 percent. Economic growth in India has become intensely vertical, enriching those already ahead while failing to uplift those who are most in need.
Meanwhile, macroeconomic stress is quietly eroding household resilience. In 2024, 62 percent of India’s poor were “newly poor,” hit by illness, job loss, or inflation. Household debt rose to 42.9 percent of GDP; middle-class savings fell from 84 percent in 2000 to 61 percent in 2023. These shifts suggest that economic growth is not trickling down. Rather, it is trickling away.
The $4 trillion headline figure tells only one part of the story. The other part is a paradox of extraordinary expansion without equitable uplift. This raises a critical, unresolved question: how can India claim economic greatness when so many of its people remain economically invisible?
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