

Fabrice Coffrini/afp/Getty Images Fabrice Coffrini/afp/Getty Images

Speaking in Hindi, he described India as an enemy of protectionism and friend to international investors. Yet he still devoted much of his speech to defending his own record in office — and, in particular, his claim to have married economic growth with social progress. “The biggest reason for fractures within countries is inequality and disparity, leading to division and distrust,” he asserted. “I have always said that development should be inclusive and encompassing. We have tried in our own way to bridge the income and opportunity divide.”

It’s hardly surprising that India’s prime minister would claim his country as a model of inclusive growth. Having taken power in a thumping victory at the polls in 2014, Modi’s center-right Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, faces a tough re-election battle next year. While he is widely expected to win, his prospects turn on the credibility of his claim to have delivered more jobs and greater prosperity to India’s 1.3 billion people. Yet by Modi’s chosen measure of inequality, India is moving in the wrong direction.

This certainly fits with casual observation. Any traveler landing in Mumbai or New Delhi is likely to draw that sad conclusion simply from the ride from the airport. India has long been a highly stratified society, with divisions between its religions and castes, villages and cities, as well as between the richer and more industrialized south and west and more backward north and east.

Yet beginning around 1980 and gaining momentum in the aftermath of a balance of payment crisis in 1991, the country launched a series of economic reforms designed to push aside decades of socialist planning and isolation from the global economy. The positive effects of this change are written in the statistics. This year, India will be the world’s fastest-growing large nation — its $2.6 trillion economy (measured at current exchange rates) recently overtook France to become the planet’s sixth-largest. Measured by the more relevant terms of purchasing power, India’s GDP reached $9.5 trillion, making it the third-largest in the world, behind only the United States and China.

But there’s a big catch. The pace of that expansion has left India more divided by income and wealth than either of its two larger global rivals, and on a par with notoriously unequal nations like Brazil and South Africa.