Surender Kumar

This paper examines the survival and transition dynamics of Indian Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises using a unique 25‐year firm‐level panel dataset from the CMIE Prowess IQ (2000–2024), complemented with cross‐sectional evidence from the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises. Kaplan–Meier survival curves, cohort survival estimates, Markov transition matrices, and transition‐duration analysis are used to capture firms' evolvement, exit, or stagnation across size categories. We observe steep size‐dependent gradients, that is, fewer than 10% of micro firms from the 2000 cohort survived to 2022, compared with more than half of large firms. Cohort analysis reveals high “infant mortality,” with nearly half of micro and one‐third of small entrants disappearing within 10 years. Transition matrices confirm weak upward mobility: annual micro‐to‐non‐micro moves rarely exceed 10%. Duration metrics highlight sticky trajectories; on average, it takes 5–6 years for micro firms to grow into small firms. Moreover, the regression analysis reveals that larger scale and capital deepening raise the odds of growth and transition, while firm age systematically depresses them. These findings imply that survival is a precondition but not a guarantee of growth, and that access to capital, early scaling, and policy realignment are essential to foster meaningful upward mobility.

This paper measures the effect of digital payments on enhancing goods and services tax (GST) revenue in India using monthly time-series information on tax collections and digital payments. By employing an autoregressive distributed lag cointegration framework, we find that the GST elasticity concerning digital transactions is about 0.54. The implication is that a one-standard-deviation increase in the value of digital transactions spurs GST revenue of about INR 62 billion, and a one-standard-deviation increase in index of industrial production (IIP) enhances GST revenue by about INR 8 to 12 billion. These results suggest that enhancing digital transactions is an effective way of increasing tax revenue.

The Government of India has launched the Green Credit Programme (GCP)—a market-based voluntary programme—to enhance energy and resource-use efficiency, foster conservation of resources, mitigate climate change, and strengthen adaptive capacity. The programme intends to incentivize the adoption of environmentally sustainable technologies and processes through fiscal and financial nudges and effect behavioural changes. The efficacy of a policy programme depends on its design and implementation, though, in theory, such programmes are designed to be cost-effective, environmentally favourable, as well as economically inclusive. The success of a tradable programme should be judged on the basis of four parameters: design of the programme, minimization of transaction costs, market volatility, and leakage and environmental degradation. The GCP administrators have yet to issue an effective design and implementation framework for the programme.

This article examines the issues and development strategies for transforming the Indian economy into a developed nation by 2047, to which it aspires. We observe that the protectionist development strategy followed in the first four decades of independence could not bring the country out of poverty and only protected vested interests. In the last three decades, the economy did reasonably well in terms of economic growth as a result of the adoption of the strategy of economic liberalization. The pitfalls of liberalization were realized in terms of increasing inequalities and external dependencies, and stagnancy in manufacturing capacity. COVID-19 exposed the limitations of global supply chains. To lessen the shortcomings of the liberalization, the Government of India introduced the Atmanirbhar Bharat Package. It is expected that the Package will make the economy competitive and facilitate in achieving the objective of an inclusive developed nation. В статье исследуются стратегии развития, которые позволят добиться цели по превращению Индии в развитую экономику к 2047 г. Как можно наблюдать, протекционистская стратегия развития, которой страна придерживалась первые 40 лет своей независимости, не помогла выбраться из бедности, а лишь защищала интересы влиятельных кругов. В последние 30 лет экономика демонстрировала достаточно хорошие показатели роста вследствие принятия стратегии экономической либерализации. Однако растущее неравенство, зависимость от внешних факторов и стагнация производства заставили задуматься о недостатках либерализации. Пандемия COVID-19 выявила пределы глобальных цепочек поставок. Чтобы минимизировать негативные последствия либерализации, правительство Индии реализует концепцию «Самодостаточный Бхарат» (Atmanirbhar Bharat). Как ожидается, эта стратегия сделает экономику конкурентоспособной и будет способствовать достижению главной цели — стать инклюзивным развитым государством.

The precipitous spread of COVID-19 has created a conflict between human health and economic well-being. To contain the spread of its contagious effect, India imposed a stringent lockdown, and then the stringency was relaxed to some extent in its succeeding phases. We measure social benefits of the lockdown in terms of improved air quality in Indian cities by quantifying the effects with city-specific slope coefficients. We find that the containment measures have resulted in improvement in air quality, but it is not uniform across cities and across pollutants. The level of PM_2.5 decreases from about 6 to 25% in many cities. Moreover, we observe that partial relaxations do not help in resuming economic and social activities. It should also be noted that counter-virus measures could not bring levels of the emissions to WHO standards; it highlights the importance of role of green production and consumption activities.