Indian Economy News & Discussion - Nov 27 2017

[Mort Walker]

Meanwhile, quietly the Jal Jeevan Mission dashboard ticked past 80% of the country now having a household water connection:

https://ejalshakti.gov.in/jjmreport/JJMIndia.aspx

It's almost impossible to imagine how bad it was less than 6 years ago.

Thanks for the update Surajsan. If you click on the button, it will show House Hold supply (HHs) between today and 15 Aug 2019. Back then <17% of rural HH had tap water supply. Today it is >80%. This is an achievement. The Modi government has finally come to completing bijli, paani, sadak. Everything in the past, and to some political parties, is still about roti, kapda, makan.

[uddu]

India took the $10 trillion bet!
Sanjeev Sanyal on Trump's Tariffs and India’s Economic Strategy: You Can’t Miss This!

[A_Gupta]

It is only now that we have articulated a vision and hence we now know what kind of labour we need and areas of focus.
Since our internal market wasn’t rich we ended up exporting IT Labour that was the only Western equivalent workforce.
Now is the time to retool our ITIs and bring them on par with IITs etc… we need champion machinists and welders too… I recall Japanese and Korean National TV have such competitions for best welder etc and may be Germans too . Can’t believe despite following Socialism we let worker skills wither. We might still poach some back specially ones in …

Saw this: “Tim Cook said way back in 2015 that the time when the US was capable of manufacturing at this kind of scale is long gone.
‘China put an enormous focus on manufacturing. The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.’”

Can we understand better what India has and what it needs to improve in this regard?

[drnayar]

How India’s middle-class debt crisis is threatening growth - https://on.ft.com/4luW8oA via @FT

[Cyrano]

Behind pay wall Saar, could you kindly post a summary. Thank you

[rajkumar]

Behind pay wall Saar, could you kindly post a summary. Thank you

https://archive.ph/FPHGt

How India’s middle-class debt crisis is threatening growth
A rise in unsecured credit among a consumer group that symbolises the country’s investment potential is hurting its economic ambitions

Shoppers at a mall in New Delhi. A surge in retail lending has led to a sharp rise in household debt © Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg

Chris Kay in Mumbai and Krishn Kaushik in New Delhi
Published
Apr 14 2025

Anurag likes to claim he has become numb to the dozens of calls and multiple visits he receives daily from debt collectors to his home in an upwardly middle-class suburb of Mumbai.
But that harassment reached a new pinnacle about a month ago when he says an agent employed by an Indian bank phoned his wife’s boss to complain about his arrears, putting acute pressure on his family and subjecting them to wider shame and ostracism.
“This financial struggle has caused a lot of depression that I won’t discuss with anybody,” says Anurag, who is in his 50s and asked for his identity to be concealed. Since losing his travel agency job late last year, he has racked up $13,000 in debt and depleted his savings......

[Cyrano]

Can't see why they are blaming Modi for unsecured personal loans contracted by fully grown adults! The phenomenon itself is not new, more channels have opened up.

[chetak]

Exclusive: After Trump, EU seeks zero tariff from India on car imports, sources say



https://www.reuters.com/business/autos- ... 025-04-07/

NEW DELHI,
April 7

The European Union wants India to eliminate tariffs on car imports under a long-pending trade deal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is willing to sweeten its current proposal to seal the talks.

India is open to the phased reduction of tariffs to 10% from more than 100%, two industry sources and a government official said.

That is despite industry lobbying for India to retain at least a 30% tariff even if it starts reducing the levy, and also not tinker with import duties on EVs for four more years to protect domestic players.

[chetak]

Can't see why they are blaming Modi for unsecured personal loans contracted by fully grown adults! The phenomenon itself is not new, more channels have opened up.

Cyrano ji,

Every credit card company and bank is very aggressively pushing these unsecured loans.

Spammed constantly by messages, calls, and emails

This is not the kosher way to do business

The odd text, or a call now and then was something that couldn't be helped but this carpet bombing is way beyond what was happening earlier.

any grown ass adult should take the responsibility for his/her finances and also own the liability for the debt resolution, and not blame the bank or the PM for the mess he/she lands in with such loans

Invariably such loans don't result in any assets being built but mostly to fund flashy spending

[Cyrano]

Exactly!

[Suraj]

Wrote this article for SwarajyaMag:
India’s PPP GDP Growth: Is This The Most Underrated Part Of Its Economic Story?

[ernest]

Wrote this article for SwarajyaMag:
India’s PPP GDP Growth: Is This The Most Underrated Part Of Its Economic Story?

This was a good comparison of growth at the different stages of development. I felt like you'd shared something similar on this thread earlier too, because I clearly remember seeing these graphs for China/India. Great storytelling method

[A_Gupta]

Wrote this article for SwarajyaMag:
India’s PPP GDP Growth: Is This The Most Underrated Part Of Its Economic Story?

Another great article!

I wonder if there is some way to quantify how much the different countries relied on FDI and exports to fuel their growth, and where India is in the spectrum.

[suryag]

Love it suraj sir, this is indeed a perspective that i always wondered about. I mean one dosa is 60 rs in BLR and the same dosa is 12$ at the minimum, so if you produce one dosa what will you count it as towards GDP although the dosa is the same. Shatakoti naman to you sir

[drnayar]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn7x6z4gd1zo


Technology that can turn sludge from sewage into both hydrogen fuel and the miracle material graphene

[nandakumar]

Wrote this article for SwarajyaMag:
India’s PPP GDP Growth: Is This The Most Underrated Part Of Its Economic Story?

A refreshing new perspective about India's growth story and what it means in comparative terms, to rest of the world. My question is this.
Should the PPP methodology itself need a revision? Many years ago The Economist used to run what is called the McBurger Index. It would compare prices of McBurger across different countries and arrive at its own PPP factor. But that's hardly a satisfactory parameter given the high percentage of vegetarian population in the country. Is the PPP a World Bank/IMF Index?

[Supratik]

Very informative article.

[Suraj]

The main takeaways of that article are:
- PPP offers a much clearer view of the growth in real purchasing power than nominal per capita, where the movement of exchange rates can add noise.
- it answers the ‘are we growing well compared to peers’ question. We see that India outstripped almost all of Africa, starting to outstrip the lower end of the Americas and will soon overtake the lowest end of Europe.
- Despite all the noise, the current admin is delivering the fastest historical per capita growth and quality of life gains.

[A Deshmukh]

It would be interesting to see state wise distribution of gdp/per capita.
States like MH, GJ, TN, Del could be on par with western countries.

[Supratik]

Sikkim and Goa will have developed economy status (nominal) in another 6-8 years. I think the IMF cut-off for nominal is 14500 dollars for developed economies. They are already at 7000-8000 dollars nominal. Next will be HY, TG, next GJ, TN, MH. Bihar will be last. Maybe around 2050. There will be a lot of regional variation. This is why we need smaller states.

While PPP is the correct measure to compare different economies, unfortunately at the high table of rich countries they only look at nominal GDP in dollar terms. There are 2 schools of thought - one that favors a weak currency aiding an export led growth i.e. China model to a certain extent although their currency is fixed and south-east Asian countries,etc and another that follows the US model with a strong currency fueling consumption led growth and exports being restricted to high value items. I belong to the second school due to the large population of India creating a huge domestic market. I think the Indian currency unfortunately got devalued due to shocks like nuclear tests, 2008 financial crisis, 2012 corruption scams, covid, etc. It is not a natural devaluation and perhaps could appreciate within certain limits.

[S_Madhukar]

Wasn’t the devaluation supposed to reduce after demonetisation? I think we should focus on Chinese style mass production and mechanisation to improve our productivity instead of relying on devaluation… we have a bad habit of copying Britshits socialists and have inherited the same productivity issues. Shamelessly mechanise and train people to operate machines and make in India. Road sweeping like trivial stuff should be mechanised - we need to move away from labour mindset. I was pleasantly surprised to see recently in Mumbai for concrete roads I saw labourers and mechanised equipment in equal number

[VKumar]

The so called Himalayan Salt is actually mined in pukistan Punjab and has nothing to do with Himalayas .
Even the Indian FSSAI doesn't know this!
We should avoid buying products from pukistan, China, turkey and Azerbaijan. They use our own money to kill our soldiers.

[uddu]

India on track to surpass Japan's GDP, could overtake Germany by 2027: IMF
https://www.indiatoday.in/business/stor ... 2025-03-26

In Short
India to surpass Japan as 4th largest economy by FY25
Economic growth outpaced China, US, Germany
India could become $10 trillion economy by 2032

India is on track to surpass Japan and become the world’s fourth-largest economy by the third quarter of the financial year 2024-25, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The IMF data shows that India, currently the fifth-largest economy, is closing in on Japan, whose GDP stands at $4.4 trillion. While India’s economy has expanded by 105% in the last ten years, Japan’s GDP has remained stagnant.

If India continues on this growth path, it could also surpass Germany, the world’s third-largest economy with a GDP of $4.9 trillion, by the second quarter of 2027.

[Yogi_G]

If India continues on this growth path, it could also surpass Germany, the world’s third-largest economy with a GDP of $4.9 trillion, by the second quarter of 2027.

Something's not right here. We are alredy at 4.3 trillion and adding another 600 billion should be less than 18 months at current growth rates which is Q4 2025-2026. Why another two quarters?

[uddu]

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper ... EO/IND/DEU
They are calculating with 4.19 trillion by year end

[Suraj]

One of the benefits of PPP GDP data is also the more single sourced data as opposed to everyone estimating nominal GDP with whatever exchange rate they prefer to apply.

[chetak]

So Mossad found out that Gandhi family was co-ordinating with foreign sources to damage Modi & Adani.

The secret of Rahul Gandhi is out in open now.

https://sputniknews.in/20250423/how-mos ... 15558.html



Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally ordered Mossad to counter a global campaign against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, sources told Sputnik India.

Israel's spy agency Mossad hacked into the home servers of Sam Pitroda, the head of Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) and the political guru of Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, to look for evidence into the Indian opposition's alleged links to the Hindenburg Research, informed sources have told Sputnik India.

Pitroda is based out of Oakbrook Terrace in the US state of Illinois.

These sources shared that Mossad was "activated" on Adani's case after 24 January, 2023, the day New York-based short-seller accused Adani of pulling off the biggest "con" in India's corporate history, wiping off around $150 billion of the company's assets and triggering India's biggest stock market crash.

The Hindenburg charges against Adani surfaced a week before Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) inked a $1.2 billion deal to acquire controlling stakes in Haifa, Israel's largest port.


Sources said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, present at the time of the Haifa deal, personally enquired group's chairman Gautam Adani about the Hindenburg charges.

Adani was the only one from his organisation present at the meeting, while Netanyahu was accompanied by several of his aides, including Eshel Armoni, Haifa port's outgoing chairman and an ex-Mossad spy.


“This report... It is a serious threat to your business, isn’t it?” Netantyahu asked Adani at the time, sources revealed.

Adani replied, “Not at all. “It’s all lies.”


"Yes, we realize it is fabricated. But even if you see no threat, we have to be concerned. If it weakens you, it could sabotage not just this port deal but everything we have worked to build with India," the Israeli Prime Minister told the Indian guest.

Netanyahu went to the extent of describing the Hindenburg charges against Adani as an "indirect attack" on Israel, these sources said.

"Israel believes in protecting its friends. We’re going to look into this – very closely," Netanyahu assured Adani. At the time, Adani didn't have any idea that Netanyahu planned to rope in Mossad to counter Hindenburg and its global web of supporters.

[vera_k]

Would not take much to get a small operation like Hindenburg to back down.
Need to see the outcome of the US investigation into bribery committed in India. Either its shelved, or informants with knowledge of the matter will go on record in court. Hindenburg shutting down only to be replaced with the monkey of the SEC investigation is a bit too convenient.