The Indian Economy at a Crossroads

With the recent election of Narendra Modi to become India's new Prime Minister, backed by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies in the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Modi has an opportunity to chart a new economic growth path for India. With both Indian economic and productivity growth languishing at near-decade lows in 2013, significant reforms are needed if India is to restore the "Indian Economic Miracle"—the nearly two decades of double-digit growth the country experienced in the 1990s and 2000s. That growth sprang from India's courageous decision in the early 1990s to abandon its post-independence statist and import substitution industrialization economic policies and instead embrace core tenets of free and competitive markets, non-discriminatory trade, and openness to flows of goods, people, technology, and capital.

As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation writes in a seminal new report, The Indian Economy at a Crossroads, those same principles still hold the key today, and if India embraces a modern economy path that emphasizes across-the-board productivity growth in all sectors (not just in manufacturing) based on competitive markets, liberalized trade, streamlined regulations, robust innovation policies, and infrastructure investment, India will be able to generate all the economic and employment growth it needs.

Please join ITIF and Congressman Ami Bera (D-CA) for a discussion of ITIF's report and the future of India's trade and economic policies, including the new direction in which Prime Minister Modi is likely to take India's economy and a conversation on the policy reforms needed to help India achieve more robust and sustainable levels of innovation, economic, and employment growth.