In 1960, the average Japanese citizen earned $519 a year. The average South Korean earned $159 - poorer, per head, than much of sub-Saharan Africa. In 1978, the average Chinese citizen earned $157.

None of that is a typo. All three economies that are now held up as growth models in India and emerging economies started from poverty. India left poverty behind a long ago, but it has struggled to catch up with prosperity and

high-income status because it has yet to deliver the momentum that provided escape velocity to Japan, Korea, and China. India's best performance in GDP growth is yet to match the best performance of the trio - in absolute height and in duration of momentum.

India grew 7.8% in the April-June quarter of 2026, the fastest print in five quarters - the debate or the smell test on the data will probably continue all the way into the first quarter of 2027. Debates on growth are a testimony to the old proverb that goes,

'Jungle me Mor nacha kisne dekha'. India, by most estimates, is the fastest-growing large economy in this decade, averaging around 8% post the pandemic. That's worthy of applause.

Neither is the number that actually made a poor country rich was achieved in one working lifetime. That number is 10%. Not for a quarter. For years, over and over, until it stopped being news. China hit 10%-plus growth in 16 separate years between 1978 and 2010 - a 33-year span.

South Korea hit it in 16 years between 1966 and 1999, almost the same length of time. Japan hit it seven times through the 1960s alone, the tightest cluster of the three. Growth is good, but India needs greed for 10% momentum growth.

The consequence of high growth momentum is best illustrated in the rise in per capita income. In 1960, South Korea's income per person was lower than Kenya's - not folklore, literally true in the World Bank's own data.

Korea's own double-digit run began in 1966 with the GDP at $ 4.0 billion and per capita income at $134 a head. In 1999, its GDP was at $515 billion and per capita income at $11,063. Today, it stands at $36,227 a head, 228 times where it started.

Japan's run began from a higher base at $622 per person in 1961. By 1970, it was at $2,145 a head, and today stands at $35,951 - a near-70-fold rise from where it started. The China-India comparison has been narrated by this column often, but bears repetition.

In 1991, China's per capita income was at $334, and that of India was $305. Both countries were in the throes of opening up their economies. Today, the per capita income of India hovers around $ 2,810, and that of China stands at $13,862.

It is known that economies often accelerate beyond expectations in seasons. Growth spurts from a terms-of-trade windfall or a burst of capital inflows. Sustaining the high growth calls for structural change to lay the foundation, pave the path, and scaffold transition.

India is a live paradox - growth is high, GDP ranks at 6th in the world, yet per capita income trails at the lower half of the table between smaller economies like Cambodia and Kenya.

The crux of India's high-growth-low-per-capita -income paradox is where the workforce resides. Over 45% of the working population depends on agriculture, yielding 16% of the national income. The Niti Aayog tells us that 58.4% of the workforce self-certify themselves as self-employed and 19.8% as casual workers.

India's national average is Rs 2.35 lakh. The average really represents a notion - the geography of India's per capita economy stretches from Karnataka at Rs 3.80 lakh to Bihar at Rs 66,828, which is less than a sixth of Karnataka's and just over a fourth of the national average.

Robert Lucas, the Nobel laureate who studied the question of why some nations grow while others don't, asked, in 1988: "Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia's or Egypt's?"

His answer outlived the paper it appeared in: "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else."   

Structural change calls for sustained investment in human infrastructure. This week, the world observed International Literacy Day. In the 80th year of Independence, India's literacy rate stands at 81% - lower than the global average of 88%.

Indonesia reached 82% in 1990 and is at 96% today; China, which has a comparable population size and complexities, reached 90% literacy in 2000 and is at 97%. Korea's elementary-school enrolment rose to 90% by 1964, an investment that built capacity for the heavy industry push.

Source: ndtv