India will need to achieve sustained economic growth of close to 8% for at least a decade to achieve its goal of becoming a developed country by 2047, the Economic Survey 2024-’25 tabled in Parliament on Friday said.

The survey’s prediction for economic growth in 2025-’26 falls short of this target, with the country’s real gross domestic product expected to grow between 6.3% and 6.8% in the upcoming financial year.

The Economic Survey also said that to achieve growth of around 8%, the investment rate must rise to approximately 35% of the GDP, up from the current 31%.

“India will also need to create 78.5 lakh new non-farm jobs annually till 2030,32 achieve 100% literacy, develop the quality of our education institutions, and develop high-quality, future-ready infrastructure at scale and speed,” it said.

Nevertheless, the financial document said that the fundamentals of the Indian economy remained robust, although there were “strong, prominently extraneous, downsides” as well.

The Economic Survey, tabled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament a day ahead of the Union Budget for 2025-’26, details the state of the country’s economy and suggests measures to boost growth.

Published by the Department of Economic Affairs, the survey said that navigating global headwinds requires “strategic and prudent policy management and reinforcing the domestic fundamentals”.

The survey also highlighted that China’s “manufacturing colossus” posed a challenge to India as it does to the rest of the world.

Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran emphasized that boosting India’s growth over the next two decades will require harnessing the “demographic dividend through a deregulation stimulus”.

He added that the government will need to “get out of the way” to enable businesses to concentrate on their core missions and foster innovation.

“That means rolling back regulation significantly,” Nageswaran said. “That means vowing and acting to stop micromanaging economic activity and embracing risk-based regulations. That means changing the operating principle of regulations from ‘guilty until proven innocent’ to ‘innocent until proven guilty’.”

Powerful indictment of Centre’s policies: Congress

Congress leaders highlighted Nageswaran’s recommendation for the government to micromanage less, calling it a “powerful indictment” of economic policies under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Union government.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said that the Economic Survey showed the “mirror of truth” to the Modi government.

Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, referring to 10 paragraphs towards the beginning of the survey that describe the state of the Indian economy, said that they encapsulate “what was wrong with the government during the last 10 years and what needs to be done”.

“‘Get out of the way’ is the most sensible piece of advice that I have heard from any government official in the last 10 years,” he added.