These 2047 visions targeting GDP rise ignore the quantum of natural resources required for such growth.
Published Dec 20, 2025 | 10:52 AM ⚊ Updated Dec 20, 2025 | 12:40 PM
Viksit India 2047. ()
Synopsis: These Visions, including those of Gujarat, Telangana and other states, give rise in GDP as a target, without explaining how that GDP rise addresses current problems of the commonest citizen of India. GDP is in fact a faded economic parameter, which is being aggressively pushed by Indian government leaders so that people believe that their vision is specific – a number.
2047 has become a benchmark year for Vision documents in India, simply because it has emotive value. Nothing more. The emotive value is being free and celebrating freedom in the 100th year of independence from colonial rulers. These visions tie up India with similar colonial forces, without blinking an eye about the contradiction.
However, Vision documents of Union government and various State governments merely take this value, but do not carry it in their visionary strategies. Our visioneering is mostly prepared by consultants, while belittling and ignoring Constitutional planning processes. These processes emphasized and institutionalized grassroot level consultation from village upwards.
These Visions, including those of Gujarat, Telangana and other states, give rise in GDP as a target, without explaining how that GDP rise addresses current problems of the commonest citizen of India. GDP is in fact a faded economic parameter, which is being aggressively pushed by Indian government leaders so that people believe that their vision is specific – a number.
The obsession with GDP targets reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of development itself. Economists have questioned GDP as an adequate measure since the 1970s. Simon Kuznets, who developed the GDP metric, himself warned against using it as a measure of welfare. Yet here we are in 2025, with governments doubling down on a metric that cannot distinguish between productive economic activity and destructive extraction, between wealth creation and wealth concentration, between sustainable progress and environmental devastation.
When Gujarat announces a $3.5 trillion economy target, when Telangana aims for $3 trillion, when Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh each target $1 trillion – what does this actually mean for the farmer facing crop failure, the urban worker without stable employment, the family unable to afford healthcare, or the community breathing toxic air? These astronomical figures float disconnected from ground realities, serving more as political talking points than actionable development goals.
These 2047 visions targeting GDP rise ignore the quantum of natural resources required for such growth. Even while natural resources are getting depleted and scarce, these leaders are peddling dreams without alluding to the hollowness in their visions. Natural resources are depleting faster, climate change is breathing down, yet we are discussing resource intensive growth plans. This is nothing but regressive.
India’s water crisis alone should give pause to any serious planner. Groundwater levels are falling catastrophically across the country. Major rivers are dying. Urban centers face recurring water shortages. Yet the vision documents speak blithely of industrial expansion and urbanization without addressing where the water will come from.
Similarly, air quality in Indian cities ranks among the worst globally, soil degradation threatens agricultural productivity, and forest cover continues declining despite official claims – but these constraints barely register in the 2047 calculations.
The arithmetic is simple but damning: to achieve a $30 trillion economy from today’s approximately $3.5 trillion requires nearly 10x growth. Even assuming significant improvements in resource efficiency, this implies massive increases in energy consumption, water usage, material extraction, and waste generation. Where will these resources come from? What will be the environmental cost? Who will bear the burden of this extraction? The vision documents remain silent.
Climate action is being discussed in international forums, including annual COP meetings, World Economic Forum and various other platforms including UN Environment Assembly. Indian government has made Nationally Determined Contributions, twice.
Yet, the 2047 vision of both central and State governments do not reflect transformative economic and developmental principles, especially Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC), precautionary principle, polluter pays principle and just transition.
Technology, in various forms, is pushed as solution. Extractive economics, linear transactional relationships and exploitative trade mechanisms are sought to be buried under new concepts, which are essentially borrowed from World Economic Forum and other similar confabulations.
The vision documents are littered with fashionable terminology: “green growth,” “sustainable development,” “circular economy,” “smart cities,” “digital transformation.” But these remain empty signifiers without concrete mechanisms, funding commitments, or accountability frameworks.
When Telangana speaks of “bioenergy hubs” without explaining the feedstock sources, land requirements, or integration with existing energy systems, it reveals the superficiality of the exercise. When net-zero targets are announced without baseline emission inventories or sector-specific reduction pathways, they become mere greenwashing.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of these vision documents is their complete disconnection from democratic planning processes. India’s Constitution envisioned development planning as an outcome of participatory democracy.
The Planning Commission, despite its flaws, institutionalized consultation between Centre and States, technical analysis of development challenges, and systematic resource allocation. State Planning Boards facilitated grassroots participation through gram sabhas, mandal parishads, and district planning committees.
This architecture has been systematically dismantled. The Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog, which lacks the constitutional mandate and participatory structures of its predecessor. State Planning Boards have been reduced to sinecures for retired bureaucrats and political appointees. The five-year plan framework, for all its limitations, provided continuity and allowed course corrections based on experience – now replaced by ad-hoc announcements timed to electoral cycles.
Private consultancy firms now dominate vision document preparation. These firms bring templates developed for corporate clients or other countries, add local data points, insert buzzwords du jour, and produce glossy reports optimized for launch events rather than implementation.
The consultants operate at several companies and are removed from ground realities, but conduct “stakeholder consultations” in the form of tokenistic online surveys or carefully curated roundtables with pre-selected participants.
Real participatory planning requires time, patience, and genuine power-sharing. It means village communities identifying their own priorities, taluka and district bodies aggregating and reconciling these priorities, state governments providing technical and financial support, and the Centre coordinating across states.
This bottom-up process is slow and messy, producing outcomes that may not align with top-down political preferences – which is precisely why it has been abandoned.
The Telangana 2047 vision document represents a troubling exercise in aspirational rhetoric rather than substantive policy planning. The document lacks the fundamental elements that distinguish serious development blueprints from mere promotional material: empirical data on current socioeconomic indicators, rigorous analysis of existing challenges facing the state, concrete implementation timelines, or realistic resource allocation frameworks.
Instead, it offers sweeping declarations on fashionable topics like achieving net-zero emissions and expanding forest cover without acknowledging baseline realities or the structural constraints that have historically impeded progress in these areas. The absence of any meaningful engagement with Telangana’s actual problems—whether in agriculture, urban infrastructure, water management, or employment generation—renders it functionally useless as a planning instrument.
What distinguishes effective long-term vision documents from propaganda is their willingness to confront uncomfortable truths and propose measurable, funded interventions; by this standard, the Telangana 2047 plan fails comprehensively. It reads less like a roadmap for the state’s development and more like a glossy pamphlet designed for ceremonial release events, destined to gather dust on shelves while policymakers continue navigating challenges without its guidance.
Telangana government includes net-zero principle, without referring to the current level of carbon emissions, their sources and related efforts to abate these emissions. Without an assessment of these emission levels, in different sectors, this vision document promises to reach net-zero. But which are the processes that absorb these emissions?
The $3 trillion dollar GDP-centric economic objective is resource intensive, extraction-based and linear. Without a circular economy or even an inkling of thinking in this direction, this vision throws hollow concepts such as bioenergy hubs. A normal citizen cannot understand the jargon, leave alone potential investors, for whom these are empty and bereft of any serious engagement.
Agriculture: Detailed analysis of changing rainfall patterns, groundwater depletion rates, soil health indicators, and crop productivity trends. Specific interventions for each agro-climatic zone. Investment commitments for irrigation infrastructure, soil conservation, and climate-resilient crop varieties. Market linkages and price support mechanisms.
Water Security: Comprehensive water budget for the state – current availability, projected demand, gap analysis. Plans for rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge, wastewater treatment and reuse. Interstate water sharing agreements. Sector-wise allocation and efficiency improvements.
Employment: Current unemployment and underemployment data disaggregated by education level, gender, caste, and region. Analysis of emerging sectors and skill requirements. Concrete targets for job creation in manufacturing, services, and agriculture. Vocational training infrastructure and industry partnerships.
Urban Infrastructure: Projected urbanization rates and spatial distribution. Housing requirements for different income groups. Public transport network expansion with specific routes and timelines. Solid waste management systems. Air quality improvement action plans.
None of these elements are present in meaningful detail. Instead, we get vague aspirations and borrowed buzzwords.
Other countries and regions offer instructive contrasts. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework emerged from extensive consultations about what Bhutanese people actually valued – not what international development agencies prescribed. It measures progress across nine domains including psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, cultural diversity, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity, and living standards. The indicators were developed participatively and refined over years.
Costa Rica’s development strategy explicitly prioritized environmental conservation and social welfare over GDP maximization. The results speak for themselves: high life expectancy, literacy, and happiness indices despite modest per capita income. The country generates nearly 100% of its electricity from renewable sources and has reversed deforestation.
Kerala’s development model in India itself demonstrates an alternative path. Through investments in education, healthcare, and land reform, Kerala achieved social indicators comparable to developed countries despite relatively low per capita income. This was accomplished through democratic decentralization, with gram panchayats controlling significant planning and budgeting authority.
These examples share common features: clear articulation of values and priorities beyond economic growth, genuine participatory planning mechanisms, willingness to make difficult trade-offs explicitly, regular monitoring and course correction, and most importantly, plans that reflect local conditions and aspirations rather than imported templates.
Visioneering in India has to go back to drawing boards and has to be based on defined and structured process of public consultations. Indian Constitution includes provisions for developmental planning that is an outcome of democratic public participation.
This requires several concrete steps:
Reconstitute Planning Architecture: Revive planning commissions at Centre and state levels with constitutional backing. Ensure diverse representation including farmers, workers, women’s groups, environmental organizations, and marginalized communities – not just bureaucrats and industrialists.
Mandate Participatory Processes: Make gram sabha approval mandatory for any development plan affecting a village. Require district planning committees to publish draft plans for public comment. Conduct open hearings on state and national plans.
Develop Context-Appropriate Metrics: Move beyond GDP to comprehensive development indices that capture health, education, environmental quality, equity, and subjective wellbeing. Let communities define what progress means to them.
Ensure Transparency and Accountability: Publish all background studies, consultant reports, and data used in plan formulation. Establish independent monitoring mechanisms with public reporting requirements. Create enforceable implementation timelines with consequences for non-performance.
Respect Constitutional Federalism: Agriculture, water, public health, and most development subjects are in the State List or Concurrent List. Vision documents should reflect this, with states having primacy and Centre playing coordinating role.
Ground Plans in Reality: Begin every vision document with honest assessment of current conditions – what is working, what is failing, what resources are available, what constraints exist. Set realistic targets with clear pathways to achievement.
The 2047 visions as currently constituted serve political theatre rather than development planning. They allow governments to claim long-term thinking while avoiding uncomfortable questions about present failures. They create illusion of participation through superficial consultations while concentrating decision-making in executive hands, they appropriate emotive symbolism of independence while perpetuating dependent, extractive development models.
Real freedom in 2047 would mean communities empowered to shape their own futures, economies that serve human needs rather than abstract growth targets, and development that respects ecological limits. Achieving this requires rejecting the consultant-driven, GDP-obsessed, top-down approach currently in vogue.
It means returning to constitutional principles of participatory democracy and plural development pathways. Most fundamentally, it requires political courage to admit that we don’t have all the answers, and wisdom to listen to those whose lives our plans will affect.
The question is not whether India will be a $30 trillion economy in 2047. The question is whether that economy – whatever its size – will provide dignified livelihoods, clean environment, quality public services, and genuine freedom to all citizens. Until our vision documents seriously engage with this question, they will remain expensive exercises in self-delusion.
(Edited by Sumavarsha, views expressed here are personal.)
