Zero poverty, education, jobs core of Viksit Bharat plan, says Sitharaman

New Delhi: Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday outlined the government's vision for Viksit Bharat, or a developed economy, where there is zero poverty, universal access to quality education, affordable and comprehensive healthcare for every citizen, and every young person is equipped with skills and meaningful employment.

The minister underscored the need for women's full participation in economic activity and for farmers to make India the food basket of the world while delivering the C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture at the 23rd India Policy Forum organized by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).

Calling for a partnership between generations, the finance minister said India's future would depend on combining the experience of older generations with the energy and innovation of younger Indians, who would ultimately shape the country in 2047 and beyond.

“The older generation carries the wisdom and memory of this nation,” she said, while the younger generation ”brings the energy, the innovation and the leadership to execute the next phase. They are actually the people who will live in 2047 and beyond.”

Reflecting on India's economic journey since Independence, Sitharaman said the country inherited Partition, widespread poverty, food insecurity and a weak industrial base. Also, successive wars, droughts and external dependence strained public finances during the country's early decades.

Flaying the earlier centralized planning model and the ‘licence-quota-permit raj’, the minister argued that excessive concentration of authority, discretionary controls and government-led investment decisions impeded enterprise, fostered inefficiency and corruption, and delayed economic progress.

At the same time, she said the country's early decades saw important institution-building, with the establishment of organizations such as Isro, Barc, BHEL and the IITs, while major irrigation and power projects laid the foundations for future development despite implementation challenges.

Describing the turn of the millennium as a decisive pivot, she said economic development, physical connectivity and digital infrastructure moved to the forefront of national priorities. While the 2008 global financial crisis tested major economies, India's household savings and conservatively regulated banking system helped cushion the impact, she said. However, the years that followed were marked by widening fiscal deficits, rising subsidies, persistent inflation, and the twin-deficit problem.

The finance minister said that since 2014, reforms have focused on financial inclusion, the JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, and mobile number) trinity, inflation targeting through the monetary policy committee, recognition of lenders' non-performing assets, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, digital public infrastructure, the goods and services tax, and investments in science, technology and higher education.

“Despite repeated global shocks, India continued to reduce multidimensional poverty and advance its development agenda,” Sitharaman said.

India remains among world's fastest-growing major economies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected the economy to grow 6.4% in 2026 despite a weaker global outlook, underscoring the challenge of sustaining rapid growth while expanding quality employment and investing in human capital.

Setting out her vision for the decades ahead, Sitharaman said India must reject the “psychology of victimhood” and ensure that financial institutions, governance structures and public resources expand opportunities based on ability rather than privilege. Banks should remain instruments of inclusion, while schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana have helped ordinary citizens become entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial thrust

Earlier in the day, NCAER chairman Nandan Nilekani outlined a roadmap for sustaining rapid economic growth, saying India should nurture more than one million startups by 2035, simplify regulations for small businesses and redesign social security to support a more mobile workforce while creating enough jobs for its young population.

He argued that India's demographic dividend would pay off only if the country continued to generate high economic growth alongside large-scale job creation.

"Most of all, we have to make sure India is a country of entrepreneurs," Nilekani said, noting that the number of technology startups had grown from fewer than 10,000 a decade ago to around 150,000 today. If the current annual growth continues, India could have more than one million startups by 2035, he said.

According to Nilekani, future employment generation will increasingly come from millions of small businesses rather than a handful of large corporations. While artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to automate many structured jobs in large firms, smaller enterprises are expected to remain more resilient because workers typically perform multiple functions, making automation more difficult.

To unlock entrepreneurial potential, he called for sweeping deregulation, easier access to credit and markets, and wider use of digital public infrastructure and highlighted initiatives such as the account aggregator framework for expanding formal credit and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) for improving market access for small businesses.