15 April 2022

Increased economic complexity tends to accompany prosperity and so a forecast of high-wage job booms in our engineering, telecom and healthcare sectors points to India’s advancement. Economist Ricardo Hausmann suggests that prosperity arises from economic complexity and economic development is like a game of Scrabble. The private sector provides the letters (more of which enable more and longer words), and the government provides the vowels. Higher wages for workers arise from more words (more firms competing for talent), longer words (high-productivity firms and sectors) and more vowels (effective public goods). We make the case that our economic complexity, popularly associated with 5 million software jobs, will leap in the next five years as 12 million new jobs in engineering, telecom and healthcare combine with the human-capital fuel of the National Education Policy (NEP) to accelerate India’s transition to higher growth, complexity and wages