India will witness the steepest rise in living standards of the common man on the back of the government's initiatives and the efforts towards doubling per capita income in few years, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday.
Addressing the 3rd edition of the Kautilya Economic Conclave, the minister stressed that inequality in India has declined with the Gini coefficient, a statistical tool to measure inequity, showing improvement in urban as well as rural areas.
"I expect these improvements to continue as the effects of the last ten years of economic and structural reforms manifest more thoroughly in the data in the coming years as the Covid shock fades from the economy," Sitharaman said. The upcoming decades, the minister said, "will see the steepest rise in living standards for the common man, truly making it a period-defining era for an Indian to live in".
"While it took us 75 years to reach a per capita income of USD 2,730, as per IMF projections, it will take only five years to add another USD 2,000. "The upcoming decades will see the steepest rise in living standards for the common man, truly making it a period-defining era for an Indian to live in," she said.
The Indian government, she said, will try to double the per capita income in a matter of a few years for its 1.4 billion strong population (which makes up 18 per cent of the global total) notwithstanding the geopolitical challenges threatening world peace. By 2047, as India crosses the 100-year mark of independence, she said, the new Indian era will have core characteristics similar to developed countries. -- PTI