India’s next leap will be determined by its top 100 cities

Tamil Nadu and West Bengal both ended 2023-24 as revenue-deficit States, and both have just elected new governments on an anti-incumbency wave. The common label, however, conceals two structurally different fiscal problems. A revenue deficit can arise from a weak revenue base, from rigid and rising expenditure, or from both. Tamil Nadu’s deficit is overwhelmingly an expenditure-side problem resting on a strong own-revenue engine. West Bengal’s deficit is a revenue...

The proposal that emerged from a recent Niti Aayog Governing Council meeting to develop district-level GDP estimates is both timely and important. For decades, India’s development story has been told through national and state-level statistics. Yet the reality of India’s growth journey is increasingly local. The road to Viksit Bharat will ultimately be shaped not in New Delhi or state capitals, but across nearly 800 districts with vastly different economic structures, demographic profiles and development paths.

The problem with global crises is that economists tend to see them first in the aggregate, while households feel them in fragments. GDP slows by two per cent, inflation rises by three per cent, and unemployment inches up. These are important figures, of course. But for most families, the crisis comes...

We fought poverty and then revolutionized inclusion but NFHS findings suggest that assumption is no longer true. India is basically exporting urban lifestyles to rural communities and importing urban diseases back.