State government’s need to bring radical reforms to aid growth: Amitabh Kant

Bengaluru: India can’t grow on the back of only the central government and the state governments have to play their part in furthering the country’s growth story, according to India’s G20 Sherpa and former Niti Aayog chief executive officer Amitabh Kant.

“India will grow if the states grow. And therefore it's very important that not merely the southern part of India grows at more than 10%, but the northern part, the eastern part, the western parts, all of them carry out very vigorous reforms,” Kant said while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industries’ (CII) annual event for the southern region.

Kant insisted that states will need to undertake radical transformational changes to spur the next phase of India’s growth story, including scrapping unnecessary rules, regulations and licensing built up over the years and ushering in an ease of doing business.

India’s aim should be to register over 10% growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next three decades to become a $35 trillion economy. “We have to accelerate the pace of economic growth in the 9-10% range. If you grow at high rates, the compounding power of growth is so enormous” he said.

According to Kant, the country has a window of opportunity right now to monetise the human capital when the majority of the population is still young and fertility rates have just started dropping.

“Rarely in history has a country not become rich when it has no dependency burdens, and if we do not become rich now in the next two-three decades, it'll be nobody else's failure but our own,” the Sherpa added.

However, there is an immediate need to focus on skilling to make this young population employable not just in India but throughout the world, as India can’t grow without improving learning outcomes and skills, he said. As global manufacturing shifts to India and the population of western nations ages, the demand for product developers and engineers will be fulfilled by India, for which curriculum needs to be developed according to emerging job requirements, as per him.

For this, populous states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh need to equip youngsters in new age tech to supply skilled manpower to the world, he said, adding that the use of technology and artificial intelligence by educational institutes is paramount for assessment.

Kant also lamented the fact that 42% of India’s population is employed in agriculture even as it contributes only 18% to the GDP. "We need to take people away from agriculture and into other fields," he said, adding that private capital and manufacturing will aid the next decade of India’s growth and aid penetration into global markets.

"India needs to grow its share to 5% of global trade and for that, we need to grow manufacturing which is what we are doing via PLI,” he said.