India may be on the cusp of overtaking Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy, but that milestone rings hollow without global innovation leadership, argues former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.

In a column for The Times of India, the University of Chicago professor laid bare the country’s glaring failure to create global product icons, despite massive domestic scale and state support.

https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/latest/economy/story/where-is-indian-tiktok-chatgpt-raghuram-rajan-warns-country-cant-grow-rich-imitating-484411-2025-07-13

And where is Raghuram Rajan? For someone whose father was a member of IPS and who received and used all the disproportionate benefits of that to leave India as soon as he could, Dr. Rajan certainly has a short memory. It is easy and true to say that governance in India is always flailing. But you know what is not easy? To have a backbone, to have a sense of duty towards your country-of-origin, to have the will to return and take part in the mess and turmoil of politics and administration so as to make this country a better place for future generation so that they do not have to depend on having parents who are civil servants and who alone can exploit their rentier status to provide benefits for their children.

We need manufacturing - from ships to needles and everything in between - to be a developed country. ChatGPT and TikTok will not generate employment for your average unemployed rural Indian who lives off dwindling farm income or works for less than a dollar a day. This chump as governor and since has been harping on services to boost gdp growth and exports without realising that tech giants, law firms and capital markets do not create wealth for the masses. I'm not arguing that these are not important, but the thrust of government policy should not be to create an Indian ChatGPT. Not in a thousand years will we be a developed country with the current approach towards economic growth.

What good is government policy that focuses on creating and then extracting as much wealth as possible from the top 10% to distribute to the other 90% in the form of freebies or state support without any objective to build capacity through good education, healthcare, and nutrition in the 90%. Those who create wealth are not rewarded, those who are dependent on the state are not empowered. State policy has been to offset our inability to develop human resources through technology - a systematic problem that no one wants to address. Thus, emerges our perpetual state of mediocrity.