India is an elephant, and on a global stage, can pull its own weight. So it need not run as fast as the cheetah, or fly like an eagle but that does not matter, as it has it can stand on its own and should not feel inferior in comparison to others. Though we could have and can do much, much, much better. As regards to our economic growth, even if it is 4% or 5%, that is in terms of GDP size quite an achievement. For comparison, one student may improve 20% from a base of 40 to achieve 48, whereas on a base of 90, 5% improvement works up to 95. Hence comparisons can be misleading. At present, there are no other major countries that have growth rate comparable to India with the exception of China (though I do not believe their figures, and even if true, have come at a great cost) So is it any surprise why FII, multinationals etc want to set up business here?
Now having said this, if some economist says that our real growth is 3.5% or 4.5% should it matter? Do we need to have so much of a fragile ego that we get worked up to attack this opinion? It would be silly to waste time refuting each and every critic. We could also say from the perspective of the critic, there may be some validity in their thinking... But that should be taken up as a challenge to do better....
We do have a good guardianship of the economy. However, there is a lot of scope for improvement. Rather than resting on our laurels, we need to take inspirations from other big countries who are world leaders and have achieved economic growth and development, especially having come back from ruins. E.g Germany and Japan both had economies destroyed by war, but are economic engines of world. China too has made impressive gains leapfrogging ahead of us (though comparatively they had been laggards at one point of time) However, there are negative lessons too from China as the economic progress cannot be accepted at cost of environmental pollution and dependence on exports....
So while we all have opinions, and even if we disagree about them, or have different perspectives which lead us to different conclusions, it is not appropriate to get personal and pull one another down. We are much more and much better than this.... Just my view... Enjoy and have a great weekend.