India

01Structure

India is the rare large economy that industrialised second and specialised in services first. Services are about fifty-four per cent of GDP and a record share of gross value added,¹ led by software, business process work and consulting; manufacturing's share has stayed well below the level that carried east Asia through the same stage of development.

That pattern is the central fact about the Indian economy and the central argument in its policy debate. Services exports earn foreign currency and employ graduates; they do not absorb the tens of millions of workers leaving agriculture, which is what manufacturing did elsewhere.

Formal manufacturing is growing — organised-sector employment rose about six per cent in a recent year² — from a base small enough that the growth does not yet change the structure.

02Trade and exposure

India is now the world's seventh-largest exporter of services, and its share of global services trade more than doubled from about two per cent in 2005 to 4.3 per cent in 2024.³ Services exports exceeded $348 billion in the first ten months of a recent financial year, with software alone above forty per cent of the total.¹

The goods account is the mirror image: a persistent merchandise deficit, dominated by crude oil, and a services surplus that covers much of it. That composition makes the Indian external position a function of the oil price more than of any single export market.

03Energy and resources

India imports the large majority of the crude oil it consumes, and oil is the single largest item on its import bill. A rise in the oil price therefore widens the trade deficit, weakens the rupee and raises domestic fuel prices at once — three channels from the same shock, which is why energy prices are a macroeconomic question here rather than a sectoral one.

Domestic coal still generates most Indian electricity, and solar capacity is being added at a pace exceeded only by China. Demand is growing fast enough that both expand together: new renewable capacity has been meeting additional demand rather than displacing the existing fleet.

04Labour and demography

The demographic position is the opposite of every other economy on this site. India's working-age population is still growing, and the dividend is estimated to last until around 2055 — but realising it is conditional: sustained growth of eight to ten per cent for three decades is the figure usually cited as what would be required.⁴

Most employment is informal. More than thirty crore unorganised workers — over 300 million — are registered on the government's e-Shram database,¹ which gives a sense of the scale of work outside formal payrolls, social insurance and, largely, official labour statistics. This site carries no comparable Indian unemployment rate for that reason: no monthly series exists on the definition used for the other economies here.

05Public finances

The central government has been consolidating gradually, with a fiscal deficit targeted at 4.3 per cent of GDP in 2026–27 against 4.4 per cent in the revised estimate for the year before.⁵ Combined with state deficits the general government position is considerably larger, and public debt is high for an emerging economy though held almost entirely domestically and in rupees.

Capital spending has been protected through the consolidation, and subsidies — fertiliser, food, fuel — remain the line most exposed to the commodity prices described in section 03.

06Money and prices

The Reserve Bank of India has operated a formal inflation-targeting framework since 2016, aiming at four per cent within a band of two percentage points either side. Rating agencies now describe the framework as credible, with expectations better anchored than a decade ago¹ — a substantial change for an economy with India's inflation history.

The rupee is managed rather than freely floating, and the central bank holds large foreign exchange reserves to smooth it. That matters for the oil channel in section 03: reserves are what stop an oil shock from becoming a currency crisis, as it repeatedly did before.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 1.11 on consumer price inflation, 3.24 on real gdp, 0.27 on central bank policy rate.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: OECD, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.

1. Services' share of output, software's share of exports, e-Shram registrations and the inflation-targeting assessment — Economic Survey 2025-26; IBEF summary
2. Organised manufacturing employment growth — Annual Survey of Industries, via Economic Survey
3. India's rank and share in global services trade — Economic Survey analysis; Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
4. The demographic dividend and the growth rate required to realise it — Economic Survey 2025-26
5. The fiscal deficit target — PRS Legislative Research, Union Budget 2026-27