When Piketty came to India
Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of the famous book Capital in the Twenty First Century, was recently in India. He delivered a lecture on the state of inequality globally as well as in India.
“From Fragile 5 to Top 5”, India’s journey of the last ten years is a case study in itself, which will amuse and enthuse any student of economics, according to Union Minister Jitendra Singh.
From cynicism and scams of the past, the last decade under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been an opportunity to get over that dubious distinction, he said, adding, this marked the beginning of the journey from pessimism to optimism.
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Addressing the Global Business Summit here, Dr Singh said in the last ten years, India recorded a rapid rise across various global parameters and universal benchmarks.
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Today, India has emerged as the fifth largest economy in the world. In the Global Innovation Index, it ranked 81 in 2014 but is now placed at No. 40, he said.
Dr Jitendra Singh said India has the third largest Startup Ecosystem globally and is home to the fastest-growing unicorns. “From just over 350 StartUps in the year 2014, India grew over 300 times. After PM Modi gave the clarion call ‘StartUp India, Stand Up India’ from the ramparts of the Red Fort in his Independence Day address and rolled out the special StartUp scheme in 2016, today we have over 1,30,000 StartUps, besides more than 110 Unicorns,” he said.
Dr Jitendra Singh said, even though talent was never lacking in the country, the missing link of enabling milieu was created under the leadership of PM Modi. “Space reforms undertaken by PM Modi lifted the veil of secrecy that shrouded India’s Space programmes. With the opening up of the Space sector, the common masses have been able to witness the launch of the mega Space events like Chandrayaan-3 and Aditya,” he said.
Dr Jitendra Singh said four-five years back, India had just one StartUp in the Space sector. Today, it has around 190 private Space Startups after opening up of the sector, while the earlier ones have even turned entrepreneurs. There has been an investment of over Rs.1,000 crore by private Space Startups in the current financial year from April to December 2023, he said.
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