India is on track to overtake the United Kingdom to become the world’s fifth largest economy in 2018, according to data and forecasts from the International Monetary Fund. Don’t blame Brexit; the UK is coming off its eighth straight year of growth and its economy has outpaced both Germany and France this year. No, the credit is all to India.
India’s economy hasn’t had a down year in this century and has been growing at around 7% per year ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office at the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014. Next year, India’s economy will be one-third bigger than when Modi took office. That means huge change in the world’s largest democracy.
Change on that scale requires difficult policy choices. The Hindu nationalist BJP and its controversial Prime Minister have pushed through tough reforms like demonetization (the sudden removal from circulation of high denomination banknotes) and GST harmonization (the introduction of a unified national goods and services tax).