THINKING AHEAD

Of course it’s just another random moment in our collective history, but the end of a year at the end of a decade does give us pause and the opportunity to reflect on the future. So we asked a dozen experts whose job it is to think deeply about the past, present and future of the country to do just that. We asked about the economy, about climate change and the promises and threats of technology for mass transport, urban planning, defence, healthcare and agriculture. We asked about India’s place in the world and the place of politics, science and religion in India. They came back with plenty of new questions—and some consensus on the important ones. By the end of the coming decade, India will lead the world in one metric at least— population. There will be a lot more Indians and more than ever looking to live and work outside agriculture. In other words, more questions. Is this a challenge, an opportunity or an impending disaster? Don’t worry, you’ll find some cautious optimism in these pages too. India is also full of answers.

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ACCEPTANCE IS THE FIRST STEP TO RECOVERY

Globalisation determined India’s fate in the early 2000s, but it is time to find new sources of growth

BY JAHANGIR AZIZ

ALMOST TWO YEARS TO THE DAY, in a similar year-ahead for this magazine, we had written that the problem with the dominant narrative explaining India’s economic woes then was that it had little to do with reality and therefore policies based on such a narrative were unlikely to work. In the last months of 2017 when the global economy was clocking its strongest growth rate since 2010, India was languishing. At that time, there was virtual consensus among analysts, the market and the government that the decline in growth was just because of bad timing. An unfortunate and unintended confluence of demonetisation, the shift to a national GST, and rising bad debt in banks had temporarily disrupted domestic supply chains but that it was only a matter time before these headwinds would fade and India would be back to its winning ways.