The rising Tiger.....1 trillion is just the start.......

Another great day for the Indian economy. Riding on a high tide the Indian economy breaks another barrier of 1 trilion. In present day world a billion is neither here nor there for some individuals. There are 946 billionaires in the world, including 14 Indians. The richest, Bill Gates, is worth $54 billion. These days, talk is about trillion-dollar economies, of which there were only 10 till last week when New Delhi cashed into the club. India, whose GDP (the value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year) was thought to be in the $700 billion-$800 billion range, has leapfrogged to its first trillion (a 1,000 billion), stomping all over a weak dollar, which has tanked from a peak of almost Rs 49 to less than Rs 41. It’s great to belong to the $1 trillion club, until you divide it by a billion people, which gives us a per capita income of $1,000 (less if you estimate our population at 1.2 billion). That puts us at around 128th in the world, between Djibouti and Cameroon. Don’t let that make you feel bad. Because if you add India’s trillion to the trillion the 20 million Indian diaspora is said to hold, we go up to $2 trillion, which would put us at No 7, overtaking Brazil, Spain, Canada, and Italy.

Over the past few months, the best way to leverage the once ‘almighty dollar,’ an expression first used by Washington Irving, and now in terminal decline, has been to turn it into convertible rupees. The rupee is working much harder. An NRI visited Taj Mahal and asked his guide how many years it took to build it. The guide replied, ‘‘20 years.’’ The NRI remarked, ‘‘You guys are lazy. In America we would have done it in five years.’’ At Red Fort, he asked the same question. The guide wanted to impress him and said, ‘‘Only 10 years.’’ The NRI sneered, ‘‘You guys are slow. In America we could have built it in 2 1/2 years.’’ When they neared Qutub Minar, the NRI asked, ‘‘What is that tower?’’ The guide replied, ‘‘I will have to find out. When I was passing by last evening there was nothing here.’’ Smart comeback. Hopefully, we have now grown beyond the need to impress outsiders. Solidity, rather than speed, matters more. At the end of the day, Shahjehan’s Taj was built to outlast Trump’s Taj. The first trillion is just the start there much more to come.