A New Era: Million Dreams Ignite India’s Economy of Aspirations
Champaran Meat House in Bhagalpur in Bihar (Image TRH)
The Economy of Aspirations: How Small Dreams Are Reshaping India’s Growth Story
Policies Must Evolve from Poverty Alleviation to Aspiration Facilitation
By PALLAVI DAS
BHUBANESWAR, June 5, 2025 – In the bustling lanes of Berhampur, a teenage boy earns ₹500 a week working at a local bike garage. Last month, he applied for a small personal loan to buy a ring light and a tripod.
Not for fashion or romance—but to record videos for his YouTube channel, where he discusses motorcycles in Odia.
A thousand kilometres away in Surat, a young woman from rural Kandhamal stitches sequined sarees during the day and spends her nights learning digital marketing on her second-hand smartphone.
These stories may seem like footnotes in India’s economic story, but they are not. They are the story.
India today is not merely a developing economy—it is an aspiring economy. And this aspiration is not limited to the metros or the educated elite. It simmers in small towns, crackles through rural by lanes, and flashes across millions of screens in villages where dreams now wear digital shoes.
The tectonic shift from survival-based economic behaviour to aspiration-driven decision-making is perhaps the most under-discussed transformation in Indian economics—and yet, it may well be the most consequential.
The economic textbooks still speak in binaries: rural vs urban, poor vs rich, formal vs informal. But the real Indian economy has quietly sprouted a new category—the aspirational poor, or what sociologist Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire.” These are individuals and households not yet out of poverty by classical metrics, but whose choices are governed not by scarcity but by ambition.
This is the invisible force behind the rapid growth of fintech lending, ed-tech enrolments, and vernacular e-commerce.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), India has seen a sharp spike in small-ticket personal loans, especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Between 2018 and 2023, the average size of personal loans decreased even as the number of borrowers increased—suggesting people are borrowing not for crises, but for consumption, skill development, and small enterprise.
Reserve Bank of India data supports this: as of December 2023, retail loans under ₹50,000 grew by over 22% year-on-year, with the fastest growth in non-metro regions.
Behind this borrowing is a shift in the Indian psyche. Economist Jean Drèze once remarked, “Development is not only about raising incomes, but about expanding freedoms.”
Access to smartphones, social media, and digital platforms has made it possible for people in rural Odisha or remote Jharkhand to imagine alternative futures. This imagination—backed by low-cost internet and digital public infrastructure—is rapidly becoming economic action.
Take the rise of social commerce platforms like Meesho or GlowRoad, where over 70% of sellers come from non-urban India and over 60% are women, according to a RedSeer report. These micro-entrepreneurs aren’t waiting for government jobs—they are curating WhatsApp catalogues, running online tuition classes, and managing Instagram thrift stores.
In this parallel economy, aspiration is not a luxury—it is a currency.
Yet, this aspirational economy is often misunderstood by policymakers. Welfare models still assume a survivalist mind-set, offering subsidies and cash transfers that are essential but insufficient.
What the aspirational Indian needs is access to capital, skilling ecosystems, digital mentorship, and market linkages. In short, policies must evolve from poverty alleviation to aspiration facilitation.
This is not to dismiss structural constraints. Youth unemployment remains high estimated at over 17% in early 2024 by CMIE. Education quality is patchy, and job formalisation is slow. But what these structural challenges fail to dampen is the hunger to rise.
When a young woman in Ganjam learns how to do video editing on a cracked Android phone, she is not waiting for the economy to save her, she is ready to disrupt it.
This shift of mind-set can also be politically potent. Aspirational citizens are more apt to vote based on opportunity and not identity. Their expectation from the state is no longer rations and roads—they demand dignity, digital connectivity, and economic opportunity.
Aspirations can divide too. The distance between what’s wanted and what is available has never been larger. It’s one thing to engage in credit-backed consumption without any income or alternative means, but it’s another to create havoc and distress through credit-backed consumption.
Young people distancing themselves from viable power source or structures can transition from creators to cynics. Therefore, it’s critical that India builds more support structures irrespective of stated policy and uniting conduits of fintech, ed-tech, and grassroots entrepreneurship.
Odisha could, particularly as literacy increases, have the SHG backdrop, the digital access backdrop to respond to this cause.
They could create rural enterprise hubs, vernacular content creation platforms and celebrate young people manifests by creating specific challenges; and have a development plan that employs the demographic advantage of young people, but instead of concentrating opportunities outside of villages, it builds opportunities in villages.
India’s future will not be built by a few unicorns in Bengaluru, but by millions of unrecorded hustles in Balangir, Behrampur, and Baripada. It will be driven not by the economy of scarcity, but by the economy of dreams. To understand this new India, economists must listen not just to data, but to desire.
The Indian growth story is no longer just a matter of numbers. It is a matter of narratives. And right now, the most powerful narrative is not about what India has, but what India wants. That is where the real economy lies—and it is time we started counting it.
(This is an opinion piece; views expressed solely belong to the author)
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