India, as an IT superpower, is uniquely placed to benefit from breakthroughs in AI and is set to emerge as the third-largest economy, India’s Consul General of Shanghai Pratik Mathur said on Friday.Mathur, speaking at an annual Consul Generals and CEOs Business Forum in Shanghai, said, “It's a great time to be in Asia, especially India. We are the world's largest and fastest growing democracy with a significant population in the lower to middle class that's educated, aspirational and hungry for consumption.”India is uniquely placed to benefit from the heralding of industrial revolution 4.0 and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), he said.India's economy, which is currently USD four trillion, is expected to be close to USD 30 trillion by 2047 and the country also has the advantage of younger demographics, Mathur said in his speech posted on the Consulate's website.Just a few days ago, India overtook Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world and is expected to soon overtake Germany to become the third-largest economy, he said.The economic growth spurt in India can be traced to several proximate factors. For starters, the Government of India launched the Make in India programme in 2014 for promoting India as a manufacturing hub and rolled out various incentives such as concessional loans, tax rebates as well Production Link Incentives scheme (PLI), he said.“The results are already visible. India is now the second largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world after China with over 2 billion phones shipped between 2014-2022 with an annual CAGR of 23 per cent," he said.The recent measures taken by the government are indeed revolutionary, promoting indigenisation efforts in ship building, private participation in nuclear power sector, while at the same time boosting the consumption-based economy by giving tax breaks to a 400 million strong middle class, arguably one of the largest in the world, he said.
