India Must Diversify Manufacturing To Become Viksit Bharat: Niti Aayog VC

New Delhi: Focussing on India’s manufacturing growth, Niti Aayog vice chairman Suman Bery on Thursday said that the country needs to diversify into high value sectors, leverage global knowledge, innovate locally, reform markets, build skills and improve its labour productivity to become Viksit Bharat by 2047. He also called for diversifying sources of supply so that India is not dependent on a particular supplier and integration of its medium enterprise sector with the global value chain to boost the output in manufacturing activities.

The Niti Aayog vice chairman also emphasised that the states should utilise opportunities of free trade agreements or FTAs, which were signed by the government. “The competitiveness should not only be restricted to manufacturing but should extend to services as well. India’s labour productivity is the lowest among the G20 nations and a sustained rise in productivity of labour is crucial for India to leverage its demographic dividend,” he said while addressing the Annual Business Summit 2025 of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

Bery further said that the size of the Indian economy in the purchasing power parity (PPP) term is already $15 trillion, which is more than half the size of the US economy. The PPP is the amount of currency units required to purchase a basket of goods and services that can be purchased with one unit of the reference economy's currency,” he said

On the current economy, he also said while we are $4 trillion GDP at market prices, at PPP terms we are a $15 trillion economy. “Economists tend to measure labour productivity at PPP measures the real size of the economy of countries against the size of the US economy. India needs to diversify its sources of supply, so the country wouldn’t have to depend on a particular supplier,” he said.