Antyodaya Model of India's $4 Trillion GDP Milestone

In May 2025, it was announced that India has already crossed the $4 trillion GDP mark and is currently the world's fourth largest economy, based on nominal GDP.

- PATHIKRIT PAYNE

In 2014, when Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India, India's GDP was just about $2 trillion. It was also among the 'Fragile-Five' economies of the world as per a Morgan Stanley report.

Over the next one decade, India's transformation and quantum leap to become the fourth largest, and one of the most resilient, economies of the world, has been nothing less than a phoenix-like rise from ashes. This is especially true when witnessed against the backdrop of severe disruptions that India, like many others, faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which had a devastating impact on global supply chains of critical commodities and components, even as the cost of healthcare went up manifold.

Ironically, while presenting the Interim Budget for 2014-15 in February 2014, UPA's Finance Minister had projected India to become the world's third largest economy by 2043, a benchmark that, at the current pace, India is likely to reach in another couple of years.

The fundamental dynamics of India's growth trajectory become even more profound when measured through the realm of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which translates India's GDP into a $17.65 trillion behemoth, as per the IMF, third in ranking just after the US and China, and with a per capita income of $12,132.

Focusing on both top-down and bottom-up: In this entire journey of the last 11 years in the Modi era, some of the most critical aspects of India's growth story pivot around pioneering long-stalled structural reforms like the GST or Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code Act, reducing corporate tax rates to levels at par with global benchmarks, allowing 100% FDI in contract manufacturing and insurance, opening up of new sectors such as defense and space to private sector participation, as also giving massive impetus to infrastructure development.