The Narendra Modi government wants you to believe all is well in India. It isn’t. The truth is, India, as a nation, is going through a great turmoil — economically, politically and socially. As the author and activist Arundhati Roy puts it, “an illness is upon us.”
The Indian economy, once the world’s fastest-growing economy, is now ill. As Arvind Subramanian, Modi’s former Chief Economic Advisor, wrote this month, the Indian economy is “headed for the intensive care unit.”
In a draft working paper entitled India’s Great Slowdown: What Happened? What’s the Way Out?, published by Harvard University’s Center for International Development, he writes:
Seemingly suddenly, India’s economy has taken ill. The official numbers are worrisome enough, showing that growth slowed in the second quarter of this fiscal year to just 4.5 per cent, the worst for a long time. But the disaggregated data are even more distressing. The growth of consumer goods production has virtually ground to a halt; production of investment goods is falling. Indicators of exports, imports, and government revenues are all close to negative territory. These indicators suggest that the economy’s illness is severe, unusually so.
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