India’s growth spurt will have a deep impact on manufacturing, which is expected to serve as the nursery for entrepreneur billionaires. But the similarities being drawn with China’s experience may not be quite apt. India’s growth is likely to be dependent significantly more on services. There is a pretty well-established method to acquiring scale in manufacturing that relies heavily on capital. Services offer greater creativity to entrepreneurs wanting to scale up. A decade later, India’s billionaires could very well surprise on the upside.
India is also gaining access to capital and tech. Improvements in labour force endowments through stepped up social security will contribute to the process. The country is also placed favourably in the evolving landscape of globalisation driven by services as protectionist walls are erected in manufacturing.
Tech and energy transition offer wide scope for wealth creation and India has tuned its policies to benefit from these megatrends in industrialisation. Finally, a jungle of opportunities lies in the development needs of a big population. Innovative home-grown social entrepreneurship can be exported worldwide.
There is, however, an inherent risk of excessive wealth concentration throttling India’s growth. The speed at which the Indian middle-classes are growing will determine how many billionaires the country produces over the course of the decade.
There is evidence that Indian companies are not growing at a pace needed to acquire global scale. Domestic consumption, even if it grows fairly rapidly, may not be enough. This could make the ‘India decade’ less transformative for its billionaires as well as the common man.