We hear a great deal these days about our diplomatic weight and our place at the high table of global politics. Everywhere you look, commentators are celebrating shiny new infrastructure, high-tech assembly plants, and our rising status as an indispensable middle power. But what good is bragging about capturing high-tech assembly and building grand projects when our youth remain dejected and unemployed? We are celebrating a diplomatic moment on the international stage while ignoring a deep, painful friction at home. Geopolitical weight is completely useless without mass job creation, yet we seem content to point at concrete and glass while a generation of educated young people loses hope.
The Illusion of the Middle Power Moment
There is a growing narrative that India has reached a new middle power status, capable of swinging global trade and security simply by virtue of its size and strategic position. Foreign leaders line up for summits, and international commentary regularly praises our multi-alignment. Yet we need to look closer at what this diplomatic attention actually represents.
Getting invited to platforms like the Quad is far more about a western tactical ploy to keep China on its toes than it is a sign of deep strategic weight. The United States cannot contain China without India, so we receive the invitations, the summits, and the photo opportunities. But being useful in someone else's regional calculus is not the same as building self-sustaining power.
The same logic applies to the flurry of trade agreements and headlines about bilateral deals. They remind me of the investment meets organised by Indian state governments over the years. Hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding are signed with great fanfare, photos are taken, and huge sums are announced. Yet when you check the actual record, only a negligible percentage of those MoUs ever convert into real investment or actual business flow.
Consider the proud announcements about capturing high-tech manufacturing, such as the assembly of iPhones and other electronics. Is it manufacturing, or is it merely assembly? When you look at the net exports out of those headline figures, the reality becomes far more modest once you subtract the cost of importing foreign components. Bringing in high-value parts from overseas to assemble them locally under tax subsidies does not mean we have built a self-sustaining industrial base. It means we are performing the final, low-margin step in a global supply chain while taking credit for the entire product.
Poverty Subsidised, Not Removed
To justify this optimism, analysts often argue that India is finally leaving its long history of poverty behind. But that argument is far too feeble to stand up to scrutiny. Poverty in India has not been removed; it has simply been subsidised.
Today, the country is running on a vast system of state freebies and welfare handouts. When a state spends its energy distributing basic provisions rather than building an economy that generates dignified, well-paying jobs, it has not solved the underlying crisis. It has merely made economic distress manageable enough to prevent immediate breakdown.
Handing out monthly allowances and basic grain keeps people afloat, but it does not represent economic progress. By substituting welfare schemes for broad-based industrial growth, we are disguising the true scale of underdevelopment. A nation cannot subsidise its way into becoming a genuine superpower.
The Forgotten Lessons of How Asia Works
Taking a leaf out of How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, the successful Asian economies of the past half-century were not built on clever hand-outs or surface-level assembly targets. They were built on the strength of two generations of blood, sweat, and hard effort. Real industrial capability requires long-term commitment, structural reform, and relentless discipline from both citizens and the state.
By turning India into a subsidised welfare state, how do we expect to build on anything when people are not willing to put in efforts, have become lazy, and are not concerned about anything since they are being taken care of? When a society relies indefinitely on basic relief without creating productive opportunities, it undermines the human foundation needed for true development. That is a harsh reality of today’s India, and no amount of optimistic speechmaking can hide it.
The Great Domestic Paradox
This brings us directly to the central paradox of our current development model. On one side, we have captured high-tech assembly lines, built massive infrastructure projects, and project a disciplined, modern image to the world. On the other side, millions of our youth remain dejected, unemployed, and deeply disillusioned.
How do we reconcile these two completely opposite realities?
We are told by official sources that employment is stable and the economy is thriving. But the data published by the current regime cannot be trusted to reflect what is actually happening on the ground. Anyone who speaks to young jobseekers or watches thousands of university graduates apply for basic manual government posts knows that the statistics do not match reality.
We are witnessing a persistent crisis of youth unemployment. Shiny airports, expressways, and high-profile assembly plants create impressive pictures for global audiences, but they do not absorb the millions of young people entering the workforce every single year. A bullet train or a massive new infrastructure corridor cannot hide the fact that the average graduate has nowhere to turn.
A Compromised Education System
The fundamental reason megaprojects will never solve this crisis is that they cannot replace human capital. And our human capital is in deep trouble because our education system is thoroughly compromised.
We have expanded higher education institutions in number, but degraded them in quality. Millions of students pass through colleges and universities every year, earning degrees that offer no practical skills for modern industry. They emerge into the job market with high expectations, only to discover that their education has left them completely unfit for modern industrial or technical work.
This is where the grand economic plans break down. You can offer tax incentives to foreign firms and build high-tech factories, but if your domestic education system produces graduates who lack basic technical skills and analytical grounding, those factories will remain isolated islands. They will import components, use minimal local skilled labour, and export the profits, leaving the broader population entirely behind.
We can build the largest projects in the world and take our bows on the international stage, but a nation that subsidises its poor while leaving its educated youth dejected is building on sand. Megaprojects will never replace human capital.
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