“India has become the worst-performing global stock market” with “five consecutive monthly losses, marking the longest losing streak since 1996.” This jarring reality check cuts through the relentless optimism surrounding India’s economic trajectory. While policymakers in New Delhi trumpet growth forecasts, foreign dignitaries pay homage to the world’s most populous democracy. However, the fundamentals tell a more sobering story. There are structural dependencies, manufacturing stagnation, and geopolitical constraints that may permanently cap India’s superpower ambitions.

This isn’t just about quarterly GDP figures or stock market volatility. It’s about whether a nation of 1.4 billion people can break free from the invisible chains of middle-income status. The nation must navigate an increasingly multipolar world. Economic sovereignty demands more than demographic dividends and digital enthusiasm.

The Great Deceleration: When Demographics Meet Reality

India’s GDP growth has slumped to 6.4% in FY 2024-25, down from 9.2% the previous year—the slowest pace in four years. The government’s tax stimulus measures may add 0.6-0.7% to GDP, but this is cosmetic surgery on deeper structural ailments. To reach high-income status by 2047, India needs to sustain 7.8% average growth over the next 22 years—a target that looks increasingly fantastical given current trajectories.

The problem isn’t cyclical; it’s architectural. Foreign direct investment has collapsed from 3.6% of GDP in 2008 to just 0.8% in 2023, reflecting not temporary market jitters but fundamental competitiveness gaps. By December 2024, gross FDI plummeted to $71 billion, marking the lowest level in five years. When the world’s fastest-growing major economy can’t attract patient capital, the issue isn’t global liquidity—it’s domestic productivity.

India’s much-vaunted demographic dividend is becoming a demographic burden. With unemployment at 4.2% and youth unemployment soaring to 15%, the situation is concerning. As 10-12 million young people enter the job market annually, the economy is failing its most fundamental test. It is not creating productive employment at scale. The services-led growth model that powered India’s rise since the 1990s has reached its natural limits. Manufacturing remains the traditional ladder to prosperity. However, it is stubbornly stuck at 13-14% of GDP, well below the government’s 25% target.

The China Trap: When Supply Chains Become Shackles

India’s superpower aspirations collide most violently with the reality of Chinese economic dominance. China controls 60% of rare earth elements production. It also manages 90% of processing. This control gives Beijing stranglehold power over the minerals essential for everything from electric vehicles to defense systems. Despite having 6.9 million metric tons of rare earth reserves, India produced only 2,900 MT in 2024. India still exports neodymium to Japan because of a lack of domestic processing capability.

This dependency isn’t academic. China’s recent export restrictions on rare earth materials are already affecting global automakers. These restrictions could cause production delays without quick solutions. India is now holding talks with companies to establish long-term stockpiles of rare earth magnets. The government is offering fiscal incentives for domestic production. However, building alternative supply chains could take years.

The semiconductor story is even more damning. India launches grand initiatives like the Production-Linked Incentive scheme. However, progress has been “significantly slow” in textiles, IT hardware, and advanced manufacturing. Meanwhile, Vietnam has become a top alternative laptop manufacturing destination, with exports up nearly 150% since 2017 to $7.1 billion, demonstrating what India could achieve if it possessed the infrastructure and regulatory agility of its Southeast Asian competitors.

The cruel irony is that U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports have increased from 10% to 20% as of March 2025. This change is creating historic opportunities for alternative manufacturing hubs. Yet India remains trapped in what economists call the “premature deindustrialization” trap—losing manufacturing competitiveness before achieving developed-country status.

The Infrastructure Mirage: Building Airports While Missing Runways

New Delhi’s infrastructure spending looks impressive on paper. Capital investment outlay has increased 11.1% to Rs. 11.11 lakh crore ($133.86 billion) in the 2024-25 budget, representing 3.4% of GDP. The government boasts of 945 km of operational metro rail lines across 21 cities and promises $1.8 trillion in infrastructure spending by 2025.

But infrastructure is about more than steel and concrete—it’s about institutional efficiency. India’s transportation infrastructure remains strained. Overburdened rail networks and road transport challenges hinder efficient movement of goods. These issues impact manufacturing competitiveness. Import tariffs on electronic parts and components have hurt assembly and input processing. This area was previously the engine of growth. It also contributed significantly to employment generation in China.

The deeper problem is regulatory sclerosis. A strong belief in mercantilism constrains India’s manufacturing output, exports, and employment. Barriers to imports can lead to an overvalued domestic currency. This makes Indian exports more expensive abroad. Higher tariffs on inputs result in higher production costs. This leads to lower competitiveness. Protectionism, which is meant to boost domestic industry, actually undermines it.

India’s ratio of goods and services exports to GDP has stagnated at around 20%, down from 25.4% in 2013. For a nation aspiring to economic superpower status, this export stagnation is particularly damaging. It limits the foreign exchange earnings needed. These earnings are essential to finance the technology imports required for industrial upgrading.

The Geopolitical Straitjacket: Strategic Autonomy Meets Strategic Reality

India’s foreign policy establishment takes pride in “strategic autonomy”—the ability to maintain independent relationships with all major powers. This worked brilliantly during the Cold War, when India was simultaneously the top recipient of U.S. economic aid and a significant beneficiary of Soviet military support. But the multipolar world of 2025 offers no such luxury.

The May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, featuring missile strikes and four days of military conflict before a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, demonstrates how regional instability continues to drain resources and attention from economic development. China’s partnership with Pakistan serves as a key instrument in Beijing’s efforts to unsettle India. This partnership forces New Delhi into a costly two-front military posture. This diverts resources from productive investment.

More fundamentally, as tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific between the United States and China, challenges to India’s ability to maintain strategic autonomy increase. This situation presents greater difficulties for India’s strategic independence. India’s strategic autonomy faces increasing challenges. Beijing wants to believe that friction with Trump will push India toward China, while the U.S. seeks to bring India further into its orbit to counter China. This great power competition leaves India with increasingly binary choices that constrain its economic options.

China is expanding its influence in the Indian Ocean region. It does this through infrastructure projects in Mauritius, Djibouti, and other strategic locations. This expansion directly challenges India’s traditional sphere of influence. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Beijing’s “String of Pearls” strategy are not just security challenges. They also present economic challenges. These include alternative trade routes and investment flows that bypass Indian markets. Consequently, they reduce New Delhi’s regional centrality.

The Innovation Paradox: Startups Without Scale

India’s tech sector provides both the greatest reason for optimism and the starkest illustration of structural limitations. As of January 2025, there are 118 unicorn startups in India with a combined valuation of over $354 billion. In 2024, the number of smartphone users surpassed one billion. By 2025, internet users are expected to surpass 900 million.

Yet this digital dynamism hasn’t translated into manufacturing prowess or export competitiveness. The fundamental problem is that services-driven growth, while impressive, has limited job-creation potential compared to manufacturing. Countries like Vietnam achieve 73% labor force participation compared to India’s 56.4%, highlighting the employment challenge that no amount of unicorn valuations can solve.

The innovation ecosystem also suffers from the same import dependencies plaguing other sectors. India may design world-class software, but the hardware running it comes overwhelmingly from China and East Asia. This situation creates a profound vulnerability. Economic leadership in the 21st century requires control over both the digital and physical layers of technology. However, India remains strong in only one.

The Path Not Taken: What Superpower Status Actually Requires

Economic superpowers don’t just grow fast—they reshape global systems. The United States created the Bretton Woods framework; China built the Belt and Road Initiative. India’s challenge isn’t achieving rapid growth but building the institutional capabilities to lead rather than follow in global economic governance.

This requires confronting uncomfortable truths about current trajectories. China accounts for two-thirds of global rare earth production. It also captures 64% of global export value. This dominance gives China pricing power and supply chain control. India can’t match this through domestic production alone. Even when U.S. facilities are fully operational, MP Materials will only produce 1,000 tons of neodymium-boron-iron magnets by 2025. This amount is less than 1% of the 138,000 tons China produced in 2018.

India needs to acknowledge that superpower status may require sacrificing some aspects of strategic autonomy. This is necessary for deeper integration with alternative supply chains and alliance systems. The U.S.-India partnership in critical minerals and the Minerals Security Partnership represent steps in this direction. They require India to accept technological dependence on Western partners. This trade-off challenges core assumptions about self-reliance.

The alternative is continued middle-power status. This means respectable growth and regional influence. However, it ultimately involves playing by rules set in Washington and Beijing rather than shaping them from New Delhi.

Bottom Line: The Arithmetic of Aspiration

India will continue growing. It will remain one of the world’s most important economies. But becoming an economic superpower requires transformations. This includes possessing the scale, technological leadership, and institutional power to reshape global economic rules. Current policies and capabilities cannot deliver these transformations.

The hard truth is that achieving 7.8% average growth for 22 years while building alternative supply chains, upgrading manufacturing capabilities, and managing great power pressures may be beyond any democracy’s institutional capacity. China’s rise occurred under unique historical circumstances—vast unutilized labor, minimal environmental constraints, and a global system that rewarded export-oriented manufacturing—that no longer exist.

India’s path to superpower status isn’t just improbable—it may be impossible under current global configurations. The question facing policymakers isn’t whether India can become an economic superpower. The concern is whether pursuing that goal distracts from the more achievable objective. That objective is to build a prosperous, technologically capable, and regionally influential major power.

Economic leadership increasingly depends on controlling supply chains and setting technological standards. In this context, India’s demographic advantages and digital innovations may prove necessary. However, they may also be insufficient. The arithmetic of aspiration rarely aligns with the geometry of global power—and for India, that gap may prove unbridgeable.