Columnists always write either convinced they are right or – if they are modest – hoping that they are. I am a very modest chap, and as the witticism goes, with much to be modest about. So, usually i just hope i am right. For this column, though, i dearly hope i turn out to be absolutely wrong.

In a typically elegantly argued article that appeared in these columns a few days back, Ruchir Sharma argued that thanks to trends like shrinking population, lower productivity growth, high global debt and low global trading activity growth expectations need to be revised downward for all groups of nations, rich, middle income and emerging.

For emerging economies like India, Sharma said economic growth of around 5% or so should be seen as the “appropriate aspirational standard”. “5% is the new 7%”, he said.

Modestly, i will make three points. First, India simply can’t afford to grow only at around 5% going forward. Second, even assuming that the growth impetus from global trade will be very modest, India can still grow at 8%; in fact 8% should be the aspirational standard. Third, there’s a real danger, however, that structural changes required for sustained 8% growth won’t happen, and given the global trade constraint, India may settle down to 5%-5.5% rate of growth.

It’s the third proposition that i dearly hope i am wrong about. Let’s try and explain all three.

India is a low-middle income country (by per capita income measure) with a still-growing population (although birth rates are stabilising) and millions stuck in extremely low productivity work, whether in agriculture, in self-employment or in what Arvind Panagariya calls mom-and-pop enterprises, business entities that on an average employ no more than half a dozen workers.

As Panagariya rightly says, and contrary to much punditry on jobs, India’s problem is not unemployment as such. Most people here find something or the other to do. The problem is a low productivity-low wage/ income equilibrium.

To lift such an economy into one where a majority find productive and reasonably paid work India needs 8% sustained growth for two decades. There can’t be any debate about this because scores of economists and thinktanks who have studied India’s economy agree this is the requirement if India were to aspire for a reasonably quick economic transformation.

India’s per capita income now is around $1,800 per year (in exchange rate terms) – awfully low, and around one-fifth of China’s. As economist Rakesh Mohan calculated in a Brookings paper (‘Moving India to a New Growth Trajectory’), for India to remove poverty and offer a “reasonable standard of living” for most citizens, per capita income needs to grow at around 7% annually and GDP, at around 8% annually for 20 years. We will still be far behind China. But we will have achieved substantive economic transformation.

Therefore, settling down at around 5% growth now will be like the paltry 3.5% growth that India managed in those lost 40 years or so (1950s, 60s, 70s and much of 80s) when socialism with Indian characteristics snuffed out much of the economy’s potential.

Economist Raj Krishna had famously described 3.5% as the Hindu rate of growth. Considering Indira Gandhi’s long reign and her iconic status as a socialist champion, and therefore her major contribution to keeping India poor, let’s call it the Indu rate of growth.

Growing at 5% now will effectively mean India sliding back to a new Indu rate of growth scenario. Perhaps even worse, because three decades-plus of liberal reforms, even if patchy, have raised aspirations.

But given the global trade constraint, can India grow at 8%? Pundits say that in recent years, global trade contributed between 1.5-2 percentage points to India’s GDP growth. Since recent average growth has been around 6.5%-7%, subtracting trade’s growth impetus neatly produces average growth of 5%.

India, though, has plenty of untapped domestic drivers of growth. Labour-intensive industrial growth is a prime example. As Mohan analyses, if labour-intensive manufacturing grows at around 10% for two decades, India will be on the way to being a different economy.

Pessimists will ask where’s the market for manufactured products, if Western demand remains low. Mohan has a good answer: India’s own domestic market and Asian demand.

The catch, however, is that for India to get on to an 8% growth path for 20 years, the government will have to play a huge role. Land and labour markets need reforms, basic services that improve primary education and health standards need upgrades, the quality of policy thinking in governments need even bigger upgrades.

Basically, governments need to have growth on their minds all the time – a change from the recent bias towards spending most policy energy on distributive justice.

These are not easy changes for a government to execute, to say the least. And it’s possible for a party like BJP in its current avatar to achieve electoral victories in a relatively low growth scenario, through smarter distributive policies. Therefore, the political incentive for a policy bias towards high growth may be low. That’s the danger – that the most powerful political party may settle for the new Indu rate of growth.

That would be a tragedy for India. That’s why i said i dearly hope i am wrong.