In a searing reassessment of India’s post-2008 economic trajectory, economist and former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India Arvind Subramanian and political scientist Devesh Kapur argue in their new book that the country’s much-touted growth resilience after 2010 was largely a statistical illusion. Beneath steady official GDP numbers lay a decade-long slowdown driven by collapsing investment, stalled credit and a prolonged twin balance-sheet crisis that policymakers and critics alike failed to diagnose in time
India’s growth boom stalled around 2010 after the global financial crisis except in one—and only one—indicator: official GDP growth. Making sense of this period and of the divergent views requires confronting the measurement problem. The official numbers (see Figure 3.4) suggest virtually no stalling: until the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s official growth was about 6.6 per cent during the 2010s—only marginally lower than in the previous decade.