Colonial legacy held back India’s economic strength: Amitabh Kant

When the British colonised India 200 years ago, India’s share of global GDP was more than 25 percent. By the time they left in 1947, it had dwindled to just 2 percent,” said former NITI Aayog CEO and G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant at Bharat Ki Soch’s flagship Mantrana discussion series on the theme “Shedding Our Colonial Vestiges: Lessons for a Viksit Bharat”.

The session, moderated by Navika Kumar, Editor-in-Chief of the Times Group, was also held to mark one year of Operation Sindoor, which Bharat Ki Soch Chairman Anil Rajput described in his inaugural address as “a powerful reflection of India’s courage, resolve, and strategic clarity in defending our country against terrorism.” The Pioneer was the media partner of the event attended by a galaxy of intellectuals from various fields.

Kant began with the numbers that define the colonial ledger. At the time of independence, he said, India had 80 per cent living in poverty, a literacy rate of only 12 percent, and an average life expectancy of just 32 years. He cited Lord Salisbury, the Secretary of State for India, who had himself acknowledged the extraction: “We bled India.” He referenced Dadabhai Naoroji’s work on poverty and un-British rule, and drew a causal link between that extraction and the famines that followed. The Bengal famine of 1770, he said, killed over 10 million people and wiped out nearly a third of Bengal. One British author had described its magnitude as worse than the Black Plague of the 14th century.

“This history we should never forget as Indians,” Kant said. “The tragedy is that Indians forget history.” But the lecture was not an exercise in grievance. Kant pivoted quickly to the argument that decolonisation, intellectual and institutional, is the precondition for genuine development. He pointed to Japan, South Korea, and China as the only three countries to achieve developed status in the post-World War II era, and noted that none of them copied Western culture or abandoned their own roots. “They went back to their history, their civilisation,” he said. “That is the lesson.”

He grounded his argument in India’s civilisational depth, citing recent archaeological evidence from the Rakhigarhi excavations suggesting Indian civilisation predates Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations, potentially going back to 4500 BC. He described Nalanda University, which at its peak had 10,000 students and 2,000 professors drawn from across Asia, as a reminder that India was once the centre of intellectual excellence in the known world.

On the path forward, Kant identified four strategic priorities for an India seeking true independence from global vulnerabilities: renewable energy, critical minerals, semiconductors, and clean technologies. He argued that India’s climatic conditions make it uniquely suited to renewable energy dominance, and said the current 270 gigawatts target should be expanded significantly. On artificial intelligence, he said India holds three distinct advantages: it generates 20 percent of the world’s data, has access to renewable energy for data centres, and possesses unparalleled talent. “Frontier AI models may be built elsewhere, but India must use AI to transform the lives of its citizens,” he said.

Anil Rajput, in his opening remarks, framed the broader purpose of the Mantrana series as a dialogue between India’s civilisational wisdom and contemporary policy. He said development cannot be only economic. “It is about the framework through which a society thinks, decides, and governs itself. We must ask whether India can truly become a developed nation without intellectual, institutional, and psychological decolonisation.”

Kant closed with a characteristic declaration. “This will not merely be India’s decade. This will be India’s century.”