With an aim to achieve India’s overall growth rate to 8%, Niti Aayog Member V K Saraswat has said that manufacturing sector in country needs to grow at almost 12-14% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). He also said that the country intended to achieve a 25% contribution by the manufacturing sector to its GDP by 2022.
Saraswat expects that the GDP grow to almost $2.7 trillion to $3 trillion by 2022, so the manufacturing contribution to the GDP will be almost 25%. Therefore, he said that they are aiming at $670 billion, almost adding around 100 million jobs in that direction. He also highlighted that the manufacturing sector's contribution to the GDP was 15% in the fiscal year 2015, almost $270 billion in a GDP of $1.8 trillion.
Citing the cutting-edge developments in defence sector worldwide, Niti Aayog Member has said that India could not omit the defence and aerospace sectors if it intended to inject a higher level of input from the manufacturing sector to its economy. He noted that the country's current share of GDP expenditure for research in the defence sector was insufficient. He also said that they are still spending 0.9% of the GDP in research and development (R&D) and if compare to the top five (defence spenders in world), they are way down. Therefore, he said that the country needed to pump in more investments in research and development to compete with global giants in defence.