India's 7% GDP growth rate is not fabricated. The infrastructure investment — highways, railways, airports, digital payments — is visible and real. The country's services sector and its technology industry are genuine global success stories. And yet: the government's flagship food security programme — the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, which provides free grain to 800 million people — has been extended repeatedly since the pandemic, and is now effectively permanent.

Hold both of those facts in your mind simultaneously. Seven percent annual GDP growth. Eight hundred million people still requiring emergency food support. This is the paradox that India's economic narrative refuses to fully confront.

Whose Growth Is It?

The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey — released in 2024 after a decade-long gap — confirmed what independent economists had been arguing for years. Urban consumption has grown strongly, particularly in the top two income quintiles. Rural consumption improvements are real but significantly more modest. And consumption growth in the bottom two quintiles — the people India's food security programme is designed for — has been the weakest of all.

Economists Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi estimated in 2024 that India's top 1% now commands approximately 40% of national income — the highest concentration since records began. Their methodology has been debated. But the directional conclusion — that growth is extremely concentrated at the top — is consistent with multiple independent data sources.

The Infrastructure Bet

The government's argument is fundamentally about sequencing: build the infrastructure now, let productivity gains flow down through the economy over time. It is not an inherently unreasonable argument — there is an economic literature supporting the idea that infrastructure investment has long-term multiplier effects on broad-based growth.

The honest version of that argument, however, acknowledges that the timeline matters enormously to the people waiting for those multiplier effects to arrive — and that sequencing infrastructure investment ahead of health, education, and labour protections imposes real costs on real people in the interim.

The Hard Questions

Why is the government that presides over 7% GDP growth also the government that needs to feed 800 million people for free indefinitely? Where is the growth accruing? Who is benefiting? What would it take for productivity gains to reach the households that are still dependent on PMGKAY?

These are not anti-development questions. They are the questions that any serious economy asks of itself. India deserves the space to ask them.