Economic Survey 2025-26: Taking a leaf from the economic transition of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the erstwhile West Germany, India’s Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran in the Economic Survey has called on private sector players in the country to “marry commercial dynamism with conscious contribution to nation-building”.
The document noted that the sector must recognize its role in shaping social trust and institutional credibility and called for firms to become “institutions embedded in a national project and willingly accepted constraints, risks, or long-term horizons”.
What stood common across the international instances, the survey “is not uniform policy design but a shared moral framing of enterprise,” the Survey noted adding the shared goals delivered well fpr the countries. “Business leaders viewed their firms as institutions embedded in a national project and willingly accepted constraints, risks, or long-term horizons when these advanced collective goals, such as reconstruction, technological upgrading, export capability, social stability, or geopolitical standing.”
“Profit and national interest were not seen as antagonists to be reconciled after the fact, but as dimensions of the same vocation,” the review document added.
‘…a society of citizens’
The document appealed to patient nature of corporate capital. “The most successful corporate histories in post-war America, Germany, Japan, and East Asia were marked by firms that invested ahead of immediate returns, treated technological capability and workforce upgrading as civic obligations, and derived legitimacy from strengthening national resilience, enhancing export competitiveness, and promoting social stability,” it surmised.
Even “a well-designed regulatory architecture” cannot generate capacity in isolation, wrote Nageswaran and tean in the survey. It added that regulatory institutions operate within a political-economic equilibrium shaped not only by law and administration, but also by the behaviour of the actors they regulate.
“In India, the private corporate sector is not merely a subject of regulation; it is a structural participant in the incentive environment that determines whether the state upgrades its capacity or governs through discretion,” it said.
Referring to regulatory capture, the survey wrote: “A corporate sector that externalises risk to the state does not exert pressure for higher state capacity; instead, it generates demand for discretion. Discretion, in turn, corrodes rule-based institutions.”
The document noted that there is a “relative lack of willingness and appetite to invest efforts towards long-term risk absorption and becoming globally competitive” and that “capital allocation horizons remain short”.
It termed the private sector, “not only as a collection of enterprises, but also as a society of citizens”, adding that they can play a role in achieving Viksit Bharat.
Longer investment horizons
“For India, this implies a private sector that is willing to accept longer investment horizons in innovation, skills, and quality; one that treats formalisation, productivity, and technological deepening as collective goods rather than optional strategies; and one that recognises its role in shaping social trust and institutional credibility,” the document added.
CEA Nageswaran and his team in the Finance Ministry called on business leaders to be “comfortable with competition at global standards, that reinvests success into capability building rather than financial engineering, and that frames corporate ambition in terms of what it does for India’s productive base, employment quality and international standing.”
‘Conscious contribution to nation-building’
The document stated: “National transformation is most durable when business leaders see themselves not merely as beneficiaries of growth but as trustees of a larger developmental project.”
Overall, the section acts as a call-to-action directed to the private enterprises in India to look beyond immediate personal profits, into national building initiatives that can yield growth and prosperity longer term.
“In a society undergoing rapid structural change, the private sector’s legitimacy will increasingly rest on its ability to marry commercial dynamism with a conscious contribution to nation-building, not as a slogan, but as a guiding discipline in strategy, capital allocation and organisational culture,” the Economic Survey added.
What does Economic Survey 2026 — A look at the key highlights
- For FY26, growth is projected at 7.4% as per the first advance estimates released earlier this month.
- The Indian economy is expected to expand at 6.8-7.2% in FY27, supported by strong macro fundamentals and a series of regulatory reforms, as per the Economic Survey 2025-26.
- It projects real GDP growth in FY27 in the range of 6.8 to 7.2%. “The outlook, therefore, is one of steady growth amid global uncertainty, requiring caution, but not pessimism,” it stated.
- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected 7.3% growth im FY26 and 6.4% in FY27, while the World Bank has pegged growth at 7.2% in FY26 and 6.5% in FY27.
- Subdued inflation has weighed on nominal GDP growth. The first advance estimates pegged nominal GDP growth at 8% for the current fiscal year, below the budgeted assumption of 10.1%.