“Parachute Economist” Raghuram Rajan Draws Criticism For His Comments Regarding India’s Development

Raghuram Rajan has drawn criticism for labelling India’s belief in the “hype” surrounding its rapid economic development as “the greatest mistake” and asserting that the country has serious structural issues that need attention.

The 61-year-old economist said, “We’ve got many more years of hard work to ensure the hype is real,” in an interview with Bloomberg. Politicians want you to think that we have arrived, hence, they encourage you to accept the hype. However, Rajan said, “it would be a serious mistake for India to succumb to that belief.”

Furthermore, he said that it is improbable that India would not have a developed economy by 2047 and that discussing that objective “if so many of your kids don’t have a high school education and drop-out rates remain high” would be “nonsense.”

Expert commentary was prompted by Rajan’s words.

“Silly arguments by RR (Raghuram Rajan), school dropout rates are down, college enrolment increased, huge jobs created, wrong comparison about chil subsidy given over many years, to annual spend on HE,” said Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Global Education, in a post on X.

Economist Arvind Virmani, a member of NITI Aayog, said that Raghuram Rajan’s remarks sounded like they were made by foreign specialists who had never visited India.

“We used to call visiting WB, IMF, and other MDB economists ‘parachutes,’ during the BOP crisis of the 1990s. Virmani said on X, “It’s sad that someone who has worked on the Indian economy for half a century finds a former RBI governor to sound like that.”