Introduction

India needs a consistent 10% growth rate in the economy so as to meet the basic needs of its 21st century democracy. Even after 72 years of Independence, the country is still battling with "Underdevelopment of development and development of Underdevelopment." This is evident from the critical short and medium term requirements of India given as follows:

• To alleviate poverty: India’s 21.9% of citizens live below poverty line despite 70 years of Independence.
• Doubling the farmer’s income by 2022: A goal set for warding off the agrarian distress and ensure remunerative incomes to farmers.
• Increase the employment generation: This will help leverage the demographic potential and reap demographic dividend.
• To empower the weaker sections of society: The SC’s, ST’s, women who still remain backward due to poor empowerment.
• To invest in social and economic infrastructure: Education, health, infrastructure & logistics still need a lot of improvement.

For this, India needs to undertake more substantive economic reforms in multi-sectoral format if it wants to push its economic growth rate to its long-held target range of 8 to 10 percent a year. This reform push needed by the government can be given as follows;

Agriculture Sector

• Implementing Ashok Dalwai committee recommendations
• Focus on policy to create favourable investment climate in agriculture.
• Placing agricultural marketing in the Concurrent list.
• Greater private sector participation in agri-marketing and logistics.
• Market reforms and investment in infrastructure for cold-chain integration to reduce wastages.
• Forming FPOs/VPOs as collectives to give unified voice to small and marginal farmers.
• The committee strongly recommends stepping up of institutional credit on a large scale.
• Increase focus on export to raise agricultural export by a minimum of three times by 2022-2
• Implementing the Model Land Leasing Act and encouraging Contract Farming to make the most out of available lands.
• A strong push would be given to ‘Zero Budget Natural Farming’ techniques that reduce costs, improve land quality and increase farmers’ incomes.
• A shift in agriculture to convert farmers into ‘agripreneurs’ by expanding e-National Agriculture Markets.
• Replacing the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act with Agricultural Produce & Livestock Marketing Act.

Manufacturing Sector

• The Indian MSME sector provides maximum opportunities for both self-employment and wage employment outside the agricultural sector.
• Five key aspects of facilitating the MSME sector: Access to credit; Access to market; Technology upgradation; Ease of doing business; social security for employees.
• Loans offered to small businesses in the unorganized sector are now covered by a credit guarantee scheme. Ease of credit availability within 59 minutes
• eCommerce platform reforms like Barring e-commerce marketplaces from selling products of firms in which they own stakes. ban deep discounts for selective products which earlier disturbed the level playing field.
• Setting up an export promotion cell within the MSME.
• TreDs platform to facilitate finance of trade receivables.
• Schemes like SFURTI, ASPIRE have been introduced to strengthen the Khadi and Agro MSMEs.
• ‘Make in India’ scheme: improve competitiveness, increase investments and increasing skills of workers in accordance to changing needs of market.
• Adopting global quality standards to products to enter markets of developed economies.
• Better labour codes to ensure ease of hiring and firing of employees.
• Development of SEZ’s , NIMZ to boost manufacturing sector.

Services Sector

• The Indian service sector is the fastest growing service sector in the world. It contributes more than 60% to India’s economy and accounts for 28% of employment.
• The opportunities in this fast-growing, employment-oriented, FDI attracting sector, with vast export-potential are striking.
• There is an urgent need to increase access to higher education and vocational training at affordable prices. Implementation of Sharda Prasad committee
• Focus on other sub-sectors like education, health than financial and business services which have grown at a faster rate than the services sector overall.
• Increasing Labour productivity by skill training and continuous upgradation.
• The large working age population of India should focus on developing as a knowledge-based economy.
• Focusing on other aspects of Ease of Doing business like reducing the litigation time, ease of setting up industries.
• Increasing the PPP ventures in Infrastructure projects by Government being responsible for land acquisition while private players are taking care of rest.
• Easing the FDI norms in sectors like Accounting, Retail, legal services etc. which have huge potential of investments and job generation.
• Focusing on R&D in the latest technologies like BigData, AI, Machine Learning and training people for the impending Industrial Revolution 4.0.

Overall, these steps, taken at an accelerated pace with a bottom-up approach can lead to creation of necessary forward backward linkages that can propel the economy towards double digit growth.