Is Viksit Bharat a genuine pathway to make India a developed nation? The per capita income of a developed country is currently US$14,000. While the declared policy started two and half years back, what is the trajectory India has followed since then? Does it give us hope or we are seeing scattered growth, fragmented society and benefits that go only to a select set of people?Growth per se is a fairly straight forward pathway. Given India’s labour advantage, one requires capital and improvement in productivity. Analysts have crunched figures to arrive at a minimum 9% growth for the next 22 years and a savings rate of 45% to fuel this growth. Since domestic savings is 30% of the GDP, foreign capital is required for the rest. It will be of the order of US$600 billion per annum. If we reckon the foreign capital flow since 2022 when Viksit Bharat figured in the Amritkal architecture, it would be US$115 billion in 2023-24. Sadly, the net FDI flow is negative now. The average growth rate has been around 7.6%, and after corrections for methodological weakness, it stands at 5.6%. This is on decoding the arithmetic part and it is the simplest piece of it. Now, let’s analyse the problems which have emerged from the growth path, which can be impediments to this vision and may even prove that it is neither attainable nor worth attaining.What US$14000 dollars is today would be equivalent to a much higher figure in 2047 if one deflates it by inflation factor to arrive at real GDP. If the population today is 1,450 million and it goes up to 1,800 million with a per capita income of US$14,000 equivalent, the GDP will have to be $25.2 trillion equivalent by then. If the inflation is 5% on average, the economy size will be US$71.80 trillion, whereas per capita income will have to be $45,151 in 2047.Also read: India’s 2047 Viksit Bharat Dream Lacks an Audit TrailThe problem of per capita income, however, is that it is an average. If 10% of India’s population gets per capita income of US$4,515,100 in 2047, it will hide negligible improvement or deceleration of income growth for 90% of the population. Currently, when per capita income of India is US$2700, the bottom 50% have per capita income of US$700 (i.e. US$1.90 per day) – this is worse than sub-Saharan Africa and the international benchmark for poverty. As a result, though growth matters, how it is distributed is worth looking at. Growth fetish tends to ignore such issues. Finally, will anyone like if 90% of the population continues in the most indigent circumstances while the 10% appropriate growth dividends majorly? Even today, the top 10% have an income closer to developed countries. Since 2021-2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government has declared investment driven growth by building infrastructure. Incidentally, there has been significant compression of subsidies and transfer to reduce revenue and fiscal deficits and to create fiscal space for capital expenditure. The net result has been that India is growing disproportionately. At the top end, the rich are getting richer. The poor and the lower middle class are facing negative growth even as the overall GDP is positive. This ‘K’ shaped curve of the country’s growth should ring an alarm bell.The overall strategy has been to increase capital outlay. To meet the enhanced demand, private investment will need to come. The belief that growth will create jobs and livelihood improvement has been left to trickle down, which has not happened. Ironically, the gold-plated infrastructure projects with bloated cost and upfront payback to politicians is a recipe for low productivity. Take, for example, the Dwarka Expressway. The Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) has observed that while the normative cost was Rs 18 crore per kilometre, the actual cost was 14 times more without justification. New infrastructure is built to dazzle – and not to last. New bridges collapse routinely, built infrastructure remain underutilised – like the monorail system in Mumbai – and some of them are simply vanity projects in excess of need. The productivity for these infrastructure projects is not difficult to guess.A vast segment of the population is already food and nutritionally insecure, and grapples with a broken health and education system. They also face a huge unemployment rate. Are we looking for more of this growth?While there are nearly 20 million entrants in the job market, only a few million jobs are created. In any case, India has, since 1990, invested in high technology and high capital intensive industries, rather than in MSMEs, which is not capital intensive and can absorb a mass of low-skilled people. Finally, a K-curve has also emerged in employment. High end jobs in the high growth sector are opening up, but only a limited number of people are likely to be employed in them with higher salary and with access to alternative jobs. The indirect and direct multipliers created by these industries are low-end contractual and casual jobs with transient income, high job insecurity and questionable social security. Also read: A 2047 Deadline Won’t Deliver Viksit Bharat, India Will Have to Do the WorkThis kind of employment market cannot be a ticket to a future Viksit Bharat contemplates. On the top of it, artificial intelligence is expected to create large scale job losses. It will be a world where employment will be uncertain and that will not increase production many-fold as a US$75 trillion economy will require. Pursuit of growth, per se, has not created jobs. No country has leapfrogged into a developed country without investing in reasonable human development to begin with. Investment on health, education, nutrition and employment generation creates growth impulses, widens the narrow base, and that in turn, creates future capacity for growth. China, Vietnam, Bangladesh are examples of this. Meanwhile, the Bhagwati and Panagariya approach which India follows now emphasises growth first and redistribution later. Amartya Sen & Jean Drèze have instead advised redistribution and welfare along with growth to make the overall growth inclusive and participatory. Enlarged production and consumption base of growth is a pathway to sustainable growth. Many public thinkers believe that Bhagwati and Panagariya might have got the order wrong. Basic human development should precede or be concurrent to growth as it is the means to the growth. With a broken health and education system, we are not even doing enough to nurse them to health when the majority will not be able to access private provisioning.All indications point to the fact that Vikshit Bharat 2047 will likely be with scattered development of enclaves rather than growth dividends spreading to all sections. In 2047, we will be a divided country with a major portion lying in sub-Saharan Africa, a Commonwealth country, a middle-income country, along with a small percentage with citizens of developed countries. With such widespread variety, fragmentation and high inequality, we are more likely to see a Vikshit/Viksipta (dispersed/scattered) Bharat rather than Viksit Bharat.Satya Mohanty is Former Secretary to GOI. Views are personal.Note: An earlier version of the piece had cited an incorrect figure about the actual cost of the Dwarka Expressway. The error is regretted.