High-rise buildings under construction in Mumbai (Punit PARANJPE) · Punit PARANJPE/AFP/AFP
For years India’s economy was driven by its vast services sector that saw millions of people working away in low-cost back offices providing consultancy for predominantly western companies.
But over the past decade they have given way to centres that allow firms to tap top-tier talent and technology, where white-collar staff perform tasks ranging from IT and data analytics to innovation and design.
Today, these centres are the shiniest parts of India’s red-hot economy but not everyone has been able to enjoy the boom times as opportunities remain uneven.
Amazon’s biggest office in the world is now located in southern India, and top financiers like JPMorgan have roughly 20 percent of their workforce scattered across Indian cities.
The government says the country is now home to about one-fifth of the world’s chip design engineers, helped by hiring from firms like Qualcomm and MediaTek.
This has boosted services sector growth and helped make India the fastest-growing major economy — a title it has firmly held onto since 2021.
Alouk Kumar, the head of an Indian consultancy that helps global giants set up offshore business centres, says his phone hasn’t stopped buzzing in recent weeks.
“Demand and interest have been crazy… the number of calls I have got from European firms has soared,” he said. “The way it is increasing, the next 10 years will belong to India.”
The surge in growth saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government declare in December that India had overtaken Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy.
But figures last month indicate the announcement was premature, with the crossover unlikely to happen for at least another year.
Still, economists say the eventual switch will represent a landmark achievement — less than three decades ago, Japan was the second-largest economy in the world, and India was still struggling to dismantle its quasi-socialist economic system.
Market reforms in the 1990s unlocked an eventual $283 billion software‑services industry, while a credit boom in the 2000s helped the country’s biggest conglomerates expand globally.
And since 2014, a huge infrastructure drive — new highways, airports and ports — has underpinned swift growth.
“India’s feat cannot be trivialised,” said Dhiraj Nim, an economist at ANZ Research.
Many countries, he noted, “failed to capitalise” on similar opportunities or “squandered them in the face of global shocks and imprudent policies”.
This world-beating growth — India’s economy roughly doubles in size every decade, compared to Japan, which has basically flatlined — has helped transform the country.
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