Mint Quick Edit | Economic Survey 2025: Deregulate to grow

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. With globalization in retreat and global growth impulses weakening, how can India’s economy sustain a pace of 8% expansion for at least a decade? As Economic Survey 2024-25 notes, that’s what Viksit Bharat would need. Its most notable prescription, thus, is deregulation.

Business activity should not be micromanaged and governments in general would do well to “get out of the way". This isn’t easy, it admits, but also argues it’s like “peeling an onion": after a layer of needless rules are removed, others come into view and get easier to peel. And small actions can set off a “butterfly effect" to yield big gains for business competitiveness and growth.

Small enterprises, especially, are in greater need of a lower compliance burden. In a chapter dedicated to this project, states are urged to ease rules related to legal matters, land, labour, utilities, transport, logistics and more. It offers a handy table of laws that need review for the ease of doing business.

All this is in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ slogan. As Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran says in the survey’s preface, to succeed we must “work towards giving people back their agency and enhancing the economic freedoms of individuals and organisations." As a pile of evidence indicates, this should deliver “entrepreneurship, investment, innovation and growth." Indeed.