This year’s Economic Survey opens on a measuredly confident note, presenting the state of the economy as one that is pushing the growth frontier. The confidence is not without basis: despite pronounced global headwinds, heightened volatility and uncertainty, India has recorded moderate growth. However, this does not yet amount to a decisive push to the growth frontier.By the Survey’s own projections, growth in FY26 is placed at around 7.4%, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in FY27 expected to ease to 6.8-7.2%. More fundamentally, an examination of growth outcomes since 2014-15 shows that the economy has expanded above 7% in barely half the years, indicating that India has yet to achieve a decisive upward shift in its growth trajectory.Sustaining economic growth of at least 8% – and preferably higher – remains essential if India is to break free of the middle-income trap. Last year’s Economic Survey recognised this constraint, arguing that the aspiration of Viksit Bharat by the centenary of Independence would require an average growth rate of around 8% over the next two decades. In concrete terms, this would mean growth closer to 9% in the coming decade, easing to around 8% thereafter, with periodic dips to about 7% during episodes of global turbulence, together delivering the required long-term average.There is also a long-standing concern about the measurement of growth. Last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assigned India’s national accounts a ‘C’ grade, citing limitations in methodology and coverage. The issue cannot be set aside and warrants careful recalibration. A key weakness lies in extrapolating organised-sector performance to an economy that remains overwhelmingly informal. As the current Economic Survey itself shows, the productivity gap between organised and unorganised sectors is substantial, raising the risk of overstating aggregate growth. If this is accounted for, the growth rate required to truly push the frontier is closer to 9-10%. By that benchmark, recent outcomes fall below India’s potential, suggesting considerable scope for the economy to perform better.Economic growth remains central to job creation, rising incomes and inclusive growth. This raises a basic question: had growth been as robust as headline numbers suggest, a stronger expansion of decent, formal employment would have followed.Job creation is not merely an outcome of growth; it is also a driver of it. Higher-quality employment feeds back into rising incomes, stronger consumption, higher investment and, through multiplier effects, faster aggregate growth. With India’s demographic window narrowing, the pace and composition of job creation acquire added significance. Without sustained job creation and rising per capita incomes, the risk of being trapped at middle-income levels intensifies. While this imperative is clearly articulated in the Economic Survey, it finds limited concrete expression in the budget.The budget describes itself as Yuva Shakti (youth power)-driven, a framing that would ordinarily place employment at its core. Yet jobs receive only limited and indirect attention in the budget speech. The budget places stronger emphasis on textiles, a sector widely recognised for its labour intensity, making this focus a notable exception. Beyond this, the emphasis rests overwhelmingly on emerging technologies and technological advancement.While technological progress is indispensable for national security, self-reliance and long-term growth, it is important to recognise that India remains a labour-surplus economy. At present, India’s growth trajectory reflects a greater reliance on technology-intensive modes of production, with the result that employment elasticity remains low, sustaining concerns around jobless growth.This underscores the imperative of addressing the employment question directly through explicit policies for job creation. The budget does propose a high-level Education-to-Employment and Enterprise Standing Committee, with a broad mandate spanning services-led employment, skills, emerging technologies and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled labour matching. While these initiatives are necessary and forward-looking, the centre of gravity of the approach remains tilted towards technology and future readiness. What receives far less attention is the immediate challenge posed by India’s vast informal and unorganised workforce, marked by low productivity and, consequently, lower incomes and economic wellbeing.For a welfare-oriented economy such as India’s, the more pressing requirement is a growth strategy that translates into better employment opportunities, higher productivity and rising incomes for the majority of workers. This is consistent with the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s articulation in the budget speech: “Our Government’s ‘Sankalp’ is to focus on our poor, underprivileged and the disadvantaged.”Giving practical meaning to this commitment may warrant a broader articulation of the Committee’s mandate, so that it engages more directly with informal employment and productivity enhancement. Failing to do so risks entrenching inequality and widening the divide between the organised and unorganised segments of the economy, rather than narrowing it.Equally consequential is the budget’s tilt towards a services-led growth narrative. While services have driven recent growth, this emphasis sits uneasily with long-standing commitments under Make in India, the objective of manufacturing-led employment, and India’s aspiration to emerge as a global manufacturing hub. Despite some progress, the manufacturing share of GDP has remained broadly stagnant, and, more critically, the sector has failed to generate employment at the scale required to rejuvenate the economy.As earlier Economic Surveys have cautioned, the absence of a decisive industrial push risks premature deindustrialisation, weakening the foundations for large-scale job creation, productivity gains and sustained structural transformation.The budget does put forward welcome initiatives on industry and MSMEs, indirectly recognising their importance in the economcy and employment genration. The proposed rejuvenation of 200 legacy industrial clusters – limited in number but meaningful in intent – along with the Rs 10,000 crore SME Growth Fund to nurture Champion SMEs, could prove significant if implemented at scale. Additional equity support for micro enterprises and measures to deepen liquidity through platforms such as Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) further strengthen this package. Given that micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for a substantial share of non-farm employment, these steps can ease financing constraints, improve operational efficiency, and promote inclusive industrial growth.These measures, while necessary, are clearly insufficient. Importantly, intent must translate into outcomes, which in turn requires a clearly articulated industrial policy backed by sustained budgetary commitment. An increasing reliance on services-led growth, increasingly reflects the difficulty or rather failure of delivering industry-led development at scale. For an economy seeking faster growth, large-scale employment generation, national security and atmanirbharta, industrialisation must remain integral to India’s growth strategy, rather than a residual or optional element.At its core, the challenge is not growth alone, but the nature of growth. In an era marked by global volatility, trade fragmentation and renewed tariff wars, pushing the growth frontier will require a strategy that reduces external dependence, builds economic resilience and delivers decent jobs. This, in turn, demands a growth model that raises productivity and incomes across the economy, particularly for India’s vast informal and unorganised workforce.Aligning services with a renewed industrial push, and placing employment at the centre of economic policy, will be critical to translating demographic potential into broad-based welfare gains. Only through such a recalibration can India avoid the middle-income trap, strengthen inclusive growth, and move decisively towards Viksit Bharat.Santosh Mehrotra taught economics in JNU, and is currently Visiting Prof, Higher School of Economics (research university), Moscow. Rakesh Ranjan has a Phd in Labour Economics from JNU, and is faculty at the Institute of International Migration, Trivandrum.