India will surpass Japan & Germany to emerge as 3rd largest economy in 5 years, says Amitabh Kant

India will surpass Japan and Germany to emerge as the third-largest economy and also the third-largest stock market in the world in the next five years, India's G20 Sherpa and former NITI Aayog CEO, Amitabh Kant said on Thursday.

Speaking at a conference on “The Deccan Conversations, Accelerating Our Growth Story”, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (Southern Region), he said India has been growing in the last three quarters at 8.3 per cent plus and has emerged as a very “resilient powerhouse” during this period.

Quoting the IMF, Kant said India will be contributing close to 20 per cent of the world's economic expansion in the next decade and South is the engine of India's growth story for the country to be a USD 35 trillion economy by 2047.

India, he stressed, needs to grow on the back of manufacturing. Smart urbanisation, and agriculture.

“India needs to improve learning outcomes and skills to ensure India provides 30 per cent of the skilled manpower globally by 2047, focus on creating a large number of large companies in India to create an ecosystem for MSMEs and SMEs to thrive and increase its R&D spending from 0.7 per cent to at least 2.5-3 per cent of GDP,” Kant said.

“For India to have accelerated the pace of growth that we are currently witnessing, we brought in a goods and services tax that is paying us rich dividends. Secondly, we brought in the insolvency and bankruptcy code, thirdly, the Real Estate Regulation Act has led to discipline in the real estate sector of India," he said.

Fourthly, Kant said, the ease of doing business at the central level has ensured that 1500 laws have been eliminated, which is big. "We also started the Startup India movement. From a mere 150 startups, today we have 125,000 startups, plus 115 unicorns."