India Will Start Adding A Trillion Dollars To Its GDP Every 12 To 18 Months: Gautam Adani

India is on track to becoming a 30 trillion-dollar economy by 2050, with the country adding a trillion dollars to its GDP every 12 to 18 months within the next decade, according to Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani.

"This will put us well on track to be a 30 trillion-dollar economy by 2050," he said at the CRISIL Ratings Annual Infrastructure Summit 2024.

By fiscal 2032, India is targeted to become a 10 trillion-dollar economy and cumulative spend on infrastructure will exceed 2.5 trillion dollars, he said while delivering the keynote address.

The Adani Group founder expects the stock market capitalisation to have exceeded 40 trillion dollars.

"No other nation is remotely close to such a scale of possibility," he added.

Citing World Bank data, Adani mentioned that in the three decades prior and post liberalisation, the Indian GDP grew by seven and 14 times, respectively.

Attributing governance as the single most important catalyst for growth in the infrastructure sector post-2014, he said that the nation has kickstarted an infrastructure capex cycle unlike anything else and this laid the foundation for several decades of it's growth.

"The reforms announced by the Late Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and the finance minister at that time, Dr Manmohan Singh, came to be collectively known as the LPG reforms," Adani noted. LPG stands for liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.

The LPG reforms marked a water-shed moment in the country's economic history and dismantled the licence raj, which had seen the government involved in almost every approval that businesses needed, he said. By initiating the 1991 market friendly reforms, India unlocked the potential of its private sector and set the stage for its subsequent expansion, Adani said during his keynote address.

The business tycoon considers the period between 1991 to 2014 as the time taken to "building the runway" and 2014 to 2024 to be about the "aircraft taking off".

As an example, he spoke about the National Infrastructure Pipeline which aims to capture key greenfield and brownfield projects for investments across all economic and social infrastructure sub-sectors on a best-effort basis.

"I consider the NIP program, that has earmarked a projected investment of Rs 111 lakh crore over the period FY20-25, as a benchmark of how a government can put in place a national view of over 9,000 infrastructure projects across sectors like energy, logistics, water, airports, and social infrastructure," he said.

The metrics of the past decade speak themselves and the results are visible to all from the quality of the multi-lane highways, access to ports across the nation’s coastline, rapid penetration of green energy, world class transmission grids, dedicated freight corridors, quality and access to airports across the country, the new metro rail networks, and the massive trans-sea links.

By the end of FY32, the targeted year for India to become a 10 trillion-dollar economy, the cumulative spend on infrastructure will exceed 2.5 trillion dollars, he said. "These are all indicative of the potential of India, and I can confidently state that the platform to create totally new market spaces in India is now in place."

Infrastructure to enable energy transition and digital infrastructure are the two emerging sectors that he is most excited about, he said.

"Both of these areas are fast converging and reshaping the landscape of sustainability to create unprecedented market opportunities. The rapid shift to renewable energy sources, coupled with the digitisation of industries, is not just a technological evolution but also a profound transformation of our entire society," he said.

Data is the new oil and therefore we've arrived at a world where the AI revolution sits at the core of every digital initiative, he said during his address. "At the heart of all this action is the Data Centre—the critical infrastructure needed to power all forms of computational needs, especially AI workloads for machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning," he said.

"The next decade will see us invest more than 100 billion dollars in the energy transition space and further expand our integrated renewable energy value chain, that today, already spans the manufacturing of every major component required for green energy generation," Adani said.

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