45 Indian Economy Facts That You Should Know!

India is soon to be home to the largest population of citizens on the planet, and as of 2014, it is one of the fastest-growing largest economies in the world.

It is on the up and up, though, and throughout the past two decades, it has seen unbelievable levels of growth that has, among other things, pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Although to properly understand how this country is going to get to where it is going, you must first understand where it has come from.

History Of Indian Economy

What is the main history of the Indian economy? After over a century of servitude to the British under colonial rule and many decades of assertive efforts, India claimed its independence in August 1947.

• For many nations, this often saw a downturn in economic prosperity because while colonists were oppressive and undeniably exploitative of their host nations, they did ensure that they were able to effectively extract every bit of economic value they could from their colonies. India was a bit different, though. It had learned well from past lessons and actually ran a pretty effective economy once they were free from colonial rule.
• Years after the war, India developed a very protectionist economy. Protectionism is the policy of a nation to favor goods produced by the nation over those produced abroad.
• Now, all nations, to some extent, will have a level of protectionism, which can be seen in things like tariffs charged on the import of raw materials or import quotas limiting the number of foreign cars that can enter the country in a given year.
• The severity and extent of these policies will determine how protectionist an economy is. A small side note is that this issue of protectionism had been in the news in 2019 with the US and Chinese trade war.
• This is ultimately a back and forth of protectionist policies that will work to favor products of their respective local countries rather than imports from abroad by artificially increasing the price of foreign goods with these import taxes.
• Countries will do this for many reasons, primarily to protect their local industries and jobs from cheaper foreign competitors with lower wages.
• Sometimes, it will just be political chestfeeding, and sometimes it's just another geopolitical negotiating strategy.
• In India's case, though, it had a very different reason to adopt this protectionist policy. India had experienced firsthand what colonialism and early global trade had meant for countries on the bottom of the industrial ladder.
• It decided that instead of subjecting another nation to the same kind of hardship it had experienced, it would rather just do everything itself.
• The way it out to achieve was through a series of five-year plans, which through regular channel viewers or savvy students of history sounds like the type of economic growth planning associated with a certain type of economic system.
• To top this up, India effectively nationalized most of its major industries in the mid-1950s and onwards, and its biggest trading partner at the time was the Soviet Union, and it had typical Soviet Esque style laws around pretty much everything, called the 'License Raj' which was pretty much just a big book of the bureaucratic red tape of anybody that wanted to do anything in the economy.
• India accounted for about 25% of the world's manufactured goods before the age of the European colonial era.
• India's per capita GDP and income were claimed to be stagnated during the colonial era, which started in the late 18th century.
• India's inflation is measured using the CPI, aka Consumer Price Index, which measures changes in prices of 260 services and commodities at the retail level.

The Main Source Of India's Economy.

Although being one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, an estimated one-third of the population live below the poverty line. India is also claimed as the world's sixth-largest economy in terms of nominal GDP.

• What is the primary source of the Indian economy? India's economic growth has improved exponentially from $288 billion in 1992 to almost $2.9 trillion as of 2019.
• Even though forestry is a particularly small contributor to India's GDP growth, it is also a booming sector and is responsible for the production of fuel, gums, wood, hardwood, and furniture.
• An estimated additional small-scale percentage of India's economy is obtained from fishing and aquaculture, with sardines, shrimps, carp, and mackerel that are being bred and caught.
• The country has classified and tracked its economy and GDP in three different sectors, namely: agriculture, services sector, and industry.
• Agriculture comprises horticulture, crops, milk and animal husbandry, fishing, aquaculture, sericulture, forestry, aviculture, and several other related activities.
• Agriculture which is claimed to be India's main source of income and revenue, has fallen to approx. 15.87% of the GDP of the country as of 2019.
• The industry comprises several manufacturing sub-sectors.
• Kollam alone comprises 600 cashew processing units.
• Some major items for India's exports comprise stones and precious metals, minerals and fuels, and auto components, whereas major import times consist of mineral fuels, electrical machinery, stones, precious metals, and many more.
• India is also the fourth-largest reserve in the world for coal and is home to natural gas, petroleum, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, diamonds, limestone, and gold.
• Major sectors in India that attracted the highest FDI equity inflows between 2000-2018 were the service sectors that included (financial services, insurance, banking, testing and analysis, and many more), telecom, computer hardware and software, construction development (comprising housing, townships), and trading.
• In India, Hyderabad is the major IT services center.
• In August 2021, the gross GST [goods and services tax revenue collection] stood at US$ 15.21 billion (Rs. 112,020 crores).
• August 27, 2021, marked India's foreign exchange reserves to increase up to US$ 633.5 billion.
• An estimated 10.58% of rural households in India are dependent on the agricultural sector as their primary source of income and are one of the largest contributors to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
• What is the richest city in India? Mumbai is the richest city in the country with an estimated GDP of $310 billion and is titled the Financial Capital of India.

Indian Economy Planning.

It is claimed that the State Bank of India (SBI) is the largest bank in India. India's economic growth was moderated in 2008 because of the global financial crisis.

• Due to the endemic violence that has plagued India's 29 states, the rapid expansion remains hampered by corruption at all levels caused by the government.
• Does India have a good economy? As reported by the World Bank, India's growth was estimated to be six% in 2019's fiscal year, and it was expected to rise to 6.9% between 2020 and 2021 and further escalate to 7.2% subsequently.
• India's economy has proved to become the 5th largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP.
• India primarily exports to North-East Asian countries (13%), North America (17.8%), the European Union (17.7%) of its goods region-wise.
• Since the early 1990s, India has subsequently opened its markets by reducing government control on investments and foreign trade.
• Indian agriculture is diverse in nature, which ranges from impoverished farm villages to developed farms that utilize modern agricultural technologies.
• India is planning one of the biggest initiatives it has ever done in its history.
• A scheme would construct over 9,078 projects and cost a whopping $1.5 trillion.
• This is the National Infrastructure Pipeline of India, and it is going to change everything.
• From building world-class infrastructures to better the quality of life of people to designing strategic projects that would overcome natural disasters and the most important factor is the creation of energy-generating projects which would affect the public welfare of India.

Importance Of The Indian Economy.

Until the 18th century, India and China were the two largest economies to contribute to the world's GDP output.

• Did you know these facts about the Indian economy and what is special about it? According to Angus Maddison's estimates, India was one of the major economies for the global contribution to the world's GDP.
• It was predicted by Goldman Sachs in 2003 that India's GDP in current prices would overtake Italy and France by 2020, the UK, Germany, and Russia by 2025, and Japan by 2035, which would make it the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China.
• India's 2017 GDP of $2.726 trillion was just short of France's GDP of $2.778 trillion, as claimed by the World Bank.
• With the election of the Modi Government, India again moves up to report's ranking for enhanced quality of institutions with a continued recovery in this particular area that began in 2014.
• Typically, India now secured an impressive 23rd rank among all countries in the Global Competitiveness Index for perceived efficiency of public spending.
• India still supports free trade outside of its core industries of the nation.