Earlier this month, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar explorer blasted off from Sriharikota, in Andhra Pradesh. If the mission succeeds, India will become “only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon”, says Geeta Pandey on the BBC. The launch was greeted at the space centre by cries of “Bharat Mata ki jai [Victory for Mother India]”.
The space launch is only the latest manifestation of India’s growing global stature. Prime minister Narendra Modi is being fêted by Western leaders. Already the world’s fifth-largest economy, India looks poised to surpass Germany and Japan by the end of the decade to take third place behind China and the US. The $3.5trn stockmarket has outgrown London and Paris to become the world’s fourth-largest and will eclipse Japan’s by 2030, say Morgan Stanley’s analysts.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts annual GDP growth of just over 6% between 2023 and 2028, the average pace of the past 30 years, says Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. On its current trajectory, GDP looks set to match America’s by 2050. Even if growth disappoints, the sheer size of the population – already the world’s largest at 1.43 billion and growing – makes it “quite reasonable
