# India needs 9% annual growth to avoid ageing before getting rich 2026-08-24T09:54:52+00:00 | Governance | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet India must grow at 9% annually for the next decade and at 8% for the decade after that to become a high-income country before its population ages, according to a new book by economists Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Parida. The book, India Out of Work: Rethinking India’s Growth Story, warns that India’s demographic dividend ends in 2040 and its population will start shrinking from 2062. The current 6.2% growth rate is inadequate, the authors argue, and there are no shortcuts. The book highlights that India’s labour-force participation rate is only about 45% against the global average of over 60%, and female participation is stuck at around 21%. Employment in manufacturing contracted for five consecutive years from 2016, and reverse migration has swelled agricultural labour by nearly 80 million. The authors link these problems to demonetisation, the poorly structured GST, and a mishandled COVID-19 response that broke the back of informal non-farm sectors. Fewer than 25% of Indian workers hold regular jobs with social security, compared with 53% in Vietnam and 92% in Germany. The authors argue for inclusive growth that raises human development, not just GDP, and say policymakers must focus on the pattern of growth, not just the overall rate. ## Indian Opinion Analysis The book lands at a moment when India's official unemployment rate has dipped, yet youth joblessness and falling labour-force participation persist. The authors, Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Parida, are drawing on decades of work on informality and skill policy. Their core argument, that India needs 8-9% sustained growth and a shift to inclusive, skill-based development, echoes the World Bank's own warnings about premature deindustrialisation. The 80-million rise in farm workers since 2016 is the reverse of what every successful developing economy has done. Watch the next Periodic Labour Force Survey: if female participation stays at 21%, the Viksit Bharat target by 2047 will be mathematically impossible. ## Coverage - frontline.thehindu.com Leads with the book's critique of jobless growth and lists demonetisation, GST, and COVID response as shocks that broke informal sectors This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Tags: Jajati Parida, labour force participation, PLFS, Santosh Mehrotra, Viksit Bharat, World Bank Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/india-needs-9-annual-growth-to-avoid-ageing-before-getting-rich/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/india-needs-9-annual-growth-to-avoid-ageing-before-getting-rich/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes. How this brief was made: an AI model read the report linked above and wrote this summary and analysis, which were published automatically. Published briefs are sampled every hour by an automated quality check; the editor verifies its findings and approves corrections, and corrected briefs carry a dated correction line. We do no original reporting. Methodology: https://indianopinion.org/ai-use-policy/