What we parade as growth is, in truth, liquidation. Like a company selling its last assets to dress up quarterly profits, we are liquidating the only deep asset we possess: the planet. Forests, aquifers, soil, and biodiversity: all depleted, none accounted for. Balance sheets never record what is lost; they only record the illusion of gain. Climate and GDP are not separate columns. Sacrifice the first, and the second collapses.
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 22 sep '25.
Each time GDP numbers are announced, the country is asked to cheer. News anchors beam, markets rise, and the political class proclaims that the nation is advancing. Growth has been turned into a secular god: the symbol of collective hope, the proof that tomorrow will be better than today.
Yet beyond the statistics lies a harsher truth. The air has grown poisonous, rivers undrinkable, and inequality unbearable. The pyramid of wealth has not only risen but sharpened, its peak gleaming while its base sinks deeper into deprivation. Since liberalisation, India’s GDP has expanded, but so has inequality, to the point that the country is now more unequal than in the early decades after Independence. Growth has become something of a pyramid scheme: dazzling for a few, hollow for the many.
