Economic Survey 2025–26 signals a shift from headline growth to institutional resilience and execution-led governance. | Representational Image
India enters 2026 at a rare inflection point in history. Our macroeconomic fundamentals are among the strongest we have seen in decades. Growth is resilient; inflation is tamed; infrastructure creation is accelerating; digital public infrastructure is quietly transforming citizen interfaces; and capital formation is returning to the centre of policy imagination. And yet, the world around us has become structurally fragile.
Geopolitics now shapes trade more than economics. Capital flows respond more to fear than to fundamentals. Technology investments are leveraged in ways that create systemic risk. Supply chains are being redesigned for security rather than efficiency. The margin for error in global markets has become thin. In such a world, the old idea that “growth alone will protect us” is dangerously inadequate. What protects nations today is institutional credibility, execution capacity, and adaptive governance.
The Economic Survey 2025–26 captures this truth with refreshing intellectual honesty. It recognises three overlapping global risk regimes—managed volatility, disorderly multipolar fragmentation, and low-probability but high-impact systemic shocks. In all three scenarios, India remains relatively better positioned than most economies but not insulated.
Our real vulnerability is not growth; it is dependence on external capital flows and the cost of capital that follows. Which means our real mission is not merely GDP expansion; it is building strategic resilience and strategic indispensability.
The Quiet Revolution: From Policing to Capability
Perhaps the most powerful signal in this year’s Survey is not fiscal arithmetic or sectoral growth projections; it is the philosophical shift in how the state views itself. We are witnessing a transition from a compliance-driven administrative state to an entrepreneurial, capability-building state. Deregulation is no longer cosmetic; inspection regimes are being replaced with trust-based self-certification; outdated criminal provisions are being dismantled; digital approvals are compressing time-to-market; and state governments are competing to reduce friction, not increase control.
This is governance maturity.
When administrative energy moves away from policing and towards coordination, monitoring, and problem-solving, productivity rises invisibly but powerfully. Investment accelerates not because subsidies increase but because uncertainty collapses.
This is precisely how modern nations scale.
Taxation Learns to Trust Citizens
Equally transformative is the quiet reinvention of tax administration. Instead of chasing compliance through fear, the system is now nudging voluntary accuracy using data, behavioural science, and transparent communication. Millions of taxpayers are self-correcting. Litigation is reducing. Friction is falling. Revenues are rising—not through coercion, but through trust. This is what digital governance was always meant to achieve.
When compliance becomes effortless and predictable, enterprise flourishes. Capital formation deepens. Formalisation accelerates. The social contract strengthens. Trust, once institutionalised, becomes the highest-return public investment.
The New Compact: State, Enterprise and Citizen
The Survey implicitly proposes a new national compact. The state must build execution capacity, not procedural density. The private sector must pursue global competitiveness, not negotiated shelter. Citizens must continuously reskill, remain productive, and embrace responsible digital behaviour. Economic power today is no longer merely about size; it is about institutional quality multiplied by execution velocity. Nations that master this equation will shape the next global order.
What the Budget Is Really Signalling
Behind the numbers, the Budget is sending four powerful messages:
1. Capital expenditure and infrastructure remain the primary growth engine.
2. Human capital investments are strategic, not social spending.
3. Fiscal discipline is a national asset in a volatile world.
4. Technology-enabled governance will increasingly replace manual bureaucracy.
This is not populism; this is long-cycle nation-building.
From Growth to Indispensability
India’s ambition must now evolve—from growth to resilience; from resilience to indispensability; and from scale to system excellence.
Strategic indispensability means the world needs India not merely as a market but as a reliable manufacturing base, a trusted digital infrastructure partner, a stable financial ecosystem, a clean-energy engine, and a governance model that actually works at population scale.
This is where India’s true comparative advantage lies. We have demonstrated that democracy, scale, and digital capability can coexist. Now we must demonstrate that execution excellence and institutional trust can scale with equal speed.
The Deeper Choice Before Us
Every generation faces a defining choice—between short-term comfort and long-term capability; between procedural safety and adaptive courage; between transactional governance and transformational stewardship.
The Economic Survey quietly calls us to choose maturity over convenience. If we respond with courage, discipline, and collective intent, India will not merely survive global volatility; it will help shape the next stable world order.
That is the opportunity of our time.
Shailesh Haribhakti is a Chartered Accountant, Independent Director, and author of Sustainable Abundance and History of the Future.
