Of Size and Suffering: Challenging the Illusion of “Progress”

Posted on 10th August, 2025 (GMT 07:50 hrs)

ABSTRACT

India’s emergence as the world’s fourth-largest economy masks deep ethical and structural crises. This article critiques the country’s development model, which prioritizes GDP growth while perpetuating informal labour, systemic inequality, environmental degradation, and authoritarian neoliberal governance. It highlights the disjunction between economic scale and human well-being, exposing how neoliberal globalization erodes local economies, social cohesion, and democratic participation. Persistent gender and social inequities, ecological injustices, and increasing external debt trap India in a cycle of “pre-debtor” capitalism, undermining sovereignty and welfare. Drawing on critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and alternative frameworks such as degrowth and localization, the article calls for transcending growth-centric paradigms to pursue justice, sustainability, and pluralistic development rooted in dignity and ecological balance.

Artworks: Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Somnath Hore

0. Introduction

India’s emergence as the world’s so-called “fourth-largest economy” by nominal GDP in 2025 is often celebrated as a milestone of its global ascendancy and economic strength, touted under chimera slogans like “Viksit Bharat,” “Amrit Kaal,” and “Acche Din.” Yet beneath this triumphant narrative lies a profound and troubling paradox: the sheer scale of India’s economy has not translated into a commensurate reduction in human suffering, social inequities, or ecological degradation. Rather than signaling holistic progress, India exemplifies a structural disconnect between aggregate economic size and the lived realities of its people and environment. The dazzling spectacle of rapid growth and development—celebrated in boardrooms and international forums—masks entrenched poverty, widespread social fragmentation, and accelerating environmental destruction. This disjunction reveals that growth, measured narrowly through GDP, functions more as a performative ideology than a reflection of substantive well-being, exposing the limits of conventional development paradigms that prioritize scale over justice, consumption over care, and accumulation over sustainability.

I. GDP as a Fetishized Metric

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has become the dominant language of development, a metric fetishized by policymakers and media alike. Yet GDP measures the volume of economic activity, not its ethical or distributive content. India’s $3.9 trillion economy rivals that of advanced nations, but its human development tells another story: 234 million Indians still live in multidimensional poverty (16.4%), and a 30.7% drop in HDI once inequality is factored in reveals the hollowness of GDP-led triumphalism.

Oxfam’s 2024 report underscores this dystopia: the top 1% of Indians now own over 40% of the nation’s wealth. Simultaneously, the state continues to underinvest in public goods—health (1.5% of GDP) and education (4.6%) remain below international benchmarks. GDP, in this light, is not a measure of national well-being but an ideological veil for elite consolidation.

Alternatives to GDP as a measure of progress have gained traction by emphasizing well-being, equity, and ecological sustainability. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) framework prioritizes holistic well-being over economic growth, valuing cultural preservation, environmental health, and community vitality. Helena Norberg-Hodge critically interrogates neoliberal globalization for its relentless push toward homogenized, centralized economic systems that prioritize endless growth, consumption, and market expansion at the expense of local cultures and ecologies. She argues that neoliberal policies dismantle local economies and social fabrics, fostering dependency on global supply chains and transnational corporations. This globalization model fuels ecological destruction and social fragmentation, undermining community resilience and sovereignty. Norberg-Hodge advocates for localized economies that nurture social cohesion, ecological balance, and democratic participation—offering a radical alternative to the growth-centric, exploitative paradigm that neoliberal globalization entrenches. Similarly, Christian Felber’s Economics of the Common Good proposes an economic model grounded in democratic participation, ethical values, and the equitable distribution of wealth—challenging GDP’s narrow materialism and offering a framework that centers human dignity and the common welfare. Together, these perspectives reveal the urgent need to transcend GDP’s limitations and rethink development in more humane, sustainable terms.

GDP falls short because it reduces complex social realities to a single monetary figure, ignoring who benefits from economic activity and at what cost. It overlooks environmental degradation, unpaid care work, shadow economy transactions, household labor, and social inequalities that deeply affect quality of life. GDP growth can coincide with worsening poverty, exploitation, and ecological collapse, masking these issues behind aggregate numbers. By focusing solely on output and consumption, GDP fails to capture human well-being, social cohesion, and sustainability—dimensions essential for truly inclusive and just development. This narrow focus risks legitimizing policies that prioritize profits and elite interests over the needs of the many.

II. Labour and the Informal Economy

Over 90% of India’s workforce is locked in informal employment—without job security, minimum wages, or access to legal protections. This is not a transitional feature of a developing economy; it is a structural feature of India’s neoliberal growth model. Economic expansion thrives on precarious labour: construction workers, gig drivers, street vendors—all invisibilized in national accounts but essential to the machine.

Growth, then, is not inclusive but extractive. The informal sector subsidizes formal accumulation, allowing corporations and the state to externalize social costs onto the working poor. In such a regime, the economy grows—but people do not flourish.

III. Persistent Gender Gaps and Social Deprivation

India’s 127th rank out of 146 in the Global Gender Gap Index (2024) is a sobering indictment of patriarchy in the heart of a growing economy. The symptoms are brutal and systemic: female foeticide, high maternal mortality, poor female labour force participation, and discriminatory access to education and healthcare.

Despite rising secondary enrollment rates (93%) under NEP 2020, foundational learning remains dismal—half of grade 5 students cannot read a grade 2-level text (ASER 2024). Women, Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities face compounded exclusion within this failing architecture. Capitalism in India has not dismantled traditional hierarchies—it has co-opted and deepened them.

IV. Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Democracy Hollowed Out

India’s economic ascent is paralleled by the erosion of its democratic foundations. Under the BJP-led regime, state power has increasingly facilitated corporate expansion while criminalising dissent. Surveillance laws, media capture, and the persecution of activists suggest the emergence of what scholars call authoritarian neoliberalism—where market reforms are pursued without democratic consent, and often against public interest.

The fusion of Hindutva majoritarianism with crony capitalism has birthed a regime that disciplines its dissenters while empowering its oligarchs. India’s rise, in this context, is not a success of democracy—it is a mutation of it. This phenomenon aligns with global patterns of neoliberal economic restructuring coinciding with the rise of illiberal authoritarian populism, as theorized by Wendy Brown and Jan-Werner Müller, whereby democratic norms are hollowed out to enable elite capture and social control.

V. Ecological Disparities

India’s growth is deeply uneven—both spatially and environmentally. Prosperity clusters in megacities and financial hubs, while states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh remain trapped in historical cycles of poverty. Simultaneously, environmental destruction accelerates. Industrial corridors and greenfield projects displace Adivasi communities, degrade forests, and contaminate water sources.

Climate injustice is stark: those least responsible for emissions—the rural poor, Dalits, and indigenous populations—suffer the most from its effects. India’s anti-green trajectory, masked by token initiatives, sacrifices ecological integrity for short-term GDP gains.

VI. Human Development: Uneven Gains in an Unequal Nation

India’s Human Development Index (HDI) has improved—rising from 135 (0.633) in 2021 to 130 (0.685) in the 2023/24 UNDP report. Life expectancy has reached 71.4 years, mean schooling 7.0 years, and GNI per capita stands at $8,170 (PPP). Initiatives like Ayushman Bharat have reduced out-of-pocket healthcare costs, and the NEP has expanded access to education.

Yet, these gains are stunted by inequality. The inequality-adjusted HDI plummets to 0.475. Per capita income remains well below China’s ($13,200), and vast disparities persist across caste, region, and gender. Sri Lanka (HDI rank 89) and China (78) continue to outpace India in core social indicators, despite having smaller economies.

India’s external debt dynamics within the framework of “pre-debtor (predator) capitalism” grounds our critique in global political economy and exposes the coercive architecture of the Washington Consensus.

VII. Trapped by the Extortionist Trio: India in the Grip of Pre-Debtor (Predator) Capitalism

India’s development paradox is not solely a domestic failure—it is also a product of externally imposed economic governance, a structure Éric Toussaint calls “a never-ending coup d’état” by global financial institutions. Since the 1991 neoliberal reforms, India has increasingly ceded economic sovereignty to the triad of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO—the institutional heart of what Toussaint and critical economists term pre-debtor (predator) capitalism.

India’s external debt stands at over $663 billion (2024), with a growing share owed to private creditors and multilateral institutions, rendering policy space hostage to credit ratings and conditional lending. These debts are rarely neutral: they come with prescriptions—fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization—that have systematically undermined India’s capacity to invest in welfare, protect its labour, or regulate its environment.

Drawing from Rosen’s Western Economists and Eastern Societies, it is clear how, from the 1950s, India was embedded in a colonial continuity of “expert-led development,” where Western technocrats became agents of epistemic and policy capture. These agents, operating under the banner of modernization, displaced indigenous development models and imposed frameworks that prioritized extractive growth over egalitarian justice.

The result is a debt-driven development model where India is both asset-rich and cash-poor, forced to mortgage its commons, deregulate its economy, and discipline its citizens to meet external benchmarks of “fiscal responsibility.” External debt thus becomes not just a financial liability, but a tool of coercion—shaping domestic priorities, silencing redistributive ambitions, and embedding the Indian state deeper into the architecture of global capital.

In this context, India is not merely a debtor—it is a structurally subordinated pre-debt-or state, coerced into perpetual compliance with elite-driven agendas both domestic and international. The fiction of sovereignty dissolves under the weight of structural adjustment, global trade regimes, and speculative finance.

This external debt burden and its attendant conditionalities deepen the fissures within India’s development model, reinforcing the disjunction between economic growth and social justice. The state’s increasing subservience to global financial institutions perpetuates austerity and market orthodoxy, limiting space for progressive redistribution or ecological stewardship. Thus, India’s so-called economic ascent is inseparable from its entrapment within predator capitalist networks that undermine sovereignty and prioritize creditor interests over citizen welfare—further complicating the paradox of size and suffering.

CHART: India’s External Debt and Debt Servicing, 2000–2025 (USD Billions)

• X-axis: Years (2000 to 2025)
• Y-axis (left): Debt Amount in USD Billions
• Y-axis (right): External Debt as Percentage of GDP
• Data Series:
• Blue line: Total External Debt (USD billions)
• Orange line: Debt Service Payments (principal + interest)
• Green dashed line: External Debt as a Percentage of GDP (plotted on right Y-axis)
• Additional Visual Elements:
• Vertical lines: Mark key policy milestones on the timeline:
  • 1991 Economic Liberalization
  • 2008 Global Financial Crisis
  • 2015 GST Introduction
  • 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic
• Gray shaded area: Indicates the growing influence of private creditors post-2010, highlighting the shift from multilateral lenders to private sources.

The second chart depicts the composition of India’s external debt by creditor type (Multilateral, Bilateral, Private Creditors) from 2000 to 2025.

VIII. Beyond “Growth”, Toward Holistic Justice: A Theoretical Reframing

India’s ostensible rise to economic prominence masks a deeper structural crisis—one that demands a critical rethinking of development beyond orthodox metrics and neoliberal paradigms. The paradox of scale and suffering is not merely empirical; it is ontological and epistemological, revealing the limitations of capitalist modernity’s governing rationalities.

Drawing on the insights of critical political economy and postcolonial theory, India’s trajectory exemplifies what Walter Rodney termed the “underdevelopment of development“—where growth under global capitalism reproduces dependency, dispossession, and precarity. The fetishization of GDP obscures the modes of production and social relations that generate inequality, environmental degradation, and political exclusion.

Moreover, following the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, human development cannot be reduced to economic output but must encompass capabilities—real freedoms that enable individuals to live dignified, meaningful lives. The persistent gaps in health, education, and gender equity expose how India’s development project remains caught in an instrumental logic that values accumulation over agency.

From a Foucauldian perspective, India’s authoritarian neoliberalism signals a biopolitical governance that disciplines bodies and populations to sustain capital accumulation, simultaneously eroding democratic pluralism and dissent. The intertwining of Hindutva nationalism and crony capitalism reflects a necropolitical economy where the right to political life is unevenly distributed, privileging some while marginalizing others.

Ecologically, the crisis aligns with the critique of the Anthropocene as a capitalist-driven planetary regime that commodifies nature and externalizes ecological costs onto vulnerable communities. India’s developmental model exemplifies what Jason W. Moore terms “world-ecology,” where social and ecological systems are inseparable and co-constitutive—requiring a rupture with growth-centric paradigms.

India’s development paradox is inseparable from enduring colonial legacies and intersecting social hierarchies of caste, gender, and ethnicity. The concept of the coloniality of power (Aníbal Quijano) explains how Eurocentric epistemologies and power structures continue to marginalize vast populations and alternative worldviews, rendering GDP a tool of epistemic violence. Building on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, it becomes clear that India’s development discourse remains entangled in colonial historicism and epistemic dominance, marginalizing indigenous knowledge systems and pluriversal alternatives.

External debt functions not only as an economic burden but also as a mechanism of neocolonial control, structuring India’s policy autonomy through what David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession.” This financial disciplining reshapes economic, social, and urban landscapes, embedding India deeper into global capitalist hegemony. The role of global financial markets and speculative capitalism further deepens vulnerabilities, as financialization transforms debt into a tool of social and ecological dispossession, intensifying India’s structural dependencies.

Addressing India’s crisis requires transcending growth itself. The degrowth perspective advocates a radical restructuring toward economies of care, social justice, and ecological regeneration, fundamentally challenging the assumption that larger economies equate to better lives.

Amidst these challenges, hope emerges from vibrant social movements, indigenous knowledge systems, and alternative economic models centered on the commons, cooperatives, and solidarity economies. These pluriversal practices contest dominant growth paradigms and envision development as a collective project rooted in justice, dignity, and planetary stewardship.

Therefore, transcending India’s development impasse necessitates engaging with alternative ontologies and economies—epistemologies that decentre growth and foreground relationality, reciprocity, and sustainability. Concepts such as Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, Felber’s Economics of the Common Good, and Norberg-Hodge’s localisation challenge hegemonic capitalism by prioritizing social justice, ecological balance, and democratic participation. Such decolonial and pluriversal approaches not only challenge economic orthodoxies but also reclaim knowledge sovereignty and cultural dignity for marginalized peoples.

In sum, India’s future hinges on dismantling entrenched structures of global and domestic power that reproduce inequality and ecological devastation. Only through a pluriversal approach to development—one attentive to justice, dignity, and planetary boundaries—can the spectacle of GDP be supplanted by a politics of flourishing for all.