Growth without meaning becomes a treadmill the rich also cannot leave

Robert F Kennedy stood at the University of Kansas on 18 March 1968 and said what every economist of the era had been trained to overlook. 'Gross National Product,' he observed, 'measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.' Six decades later, India is the world's fifth-largest economy, projected to overtake Germany and Japan by 2027 to become the third (IMF, 2024). And yet the World Happiness Report 2025 placed India 118th out of 143 countries, below Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. The Gross Domestic Product line ascends; the well-being line stays flat or descends. Growth without meaning becomes a hedonic treadmill — a machine on which even the rich run faster without arriving. A republic must measure not only how fast it is running but where it is running to. The destination question turns out to be harder than the speed question, which is why most institutions answer the easier one.

The diagnostics are old. The Easterlin Paradox, formulated by economist Richard Easterlin in 1974, observed that beyond a certain threshold of per-capita income — around 15,000 dollars in today's terms — additional income produces diminishing happiness returns. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton's 2010 Princeton study found that emotional well-being plateaus around 75,000 dollars of annual household income in the United States. In India, the empirical story is muddier — extreme poverty still depresses well-being absolutely, and a billion people are still below middle-income thresholds. But the symptoms of meaningless growth are already visible in the same data: rising rates of clinical depression among urban youth (Lancet Psychiatry 2024), increasing suicides among coaching-class students in Kota, declining marriage and fertility rates in metropolitan areas, and a quiet epidemic of loneliness across age groups. The National Mental Health Survey of NIMHANS in 2016, updated in 2023, estimated that nearly 150 million Indians need mental-health intervention; only a small fraction receive it.

Alternative indices have been suggested for decades. Bhutan announced its Gross National Happiness framework in 1972, measuring nine domains including ecological diversity, time use and psychological well-being. New Zealand's Wellbeing Budget, introduced in 2019 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, requires budget allocations to be justified against five well-being priorities. Iceland and Wales have established well-being-of-future-generations laws. India's Human Development Index rank of 134 out of 193 in the 2024 UNDP report, alongside the United Nations Multidimensional Poverty Index showing that 415 million Indians exited multidimensional poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21, presents a mixed picture: gains in material conditions, but persistent gaps in education, mental health and ecological well-being. The National Statistical Office's Time Use Survey 2024 quantified unpaid care work for the first time — and what was previously invisible to the GDP showed up as a vast economy of women's labour without market price. NITI Aayog's SDG India Index, updated annually, tracks composite progress across 17 goals, providing a more rounded picture than GDP growth alone.

India's own intellectual traditions refuse mono-dimensional measurement. The classical purusartha framework — dharma (duty), artha (material prosperity), kama (pleasure), moksha (liberation) — explicitly placed prosperity as one of four legitimate human pursuits, not as the master variable to which others are subordinated. Rabindranath Tagore's 1941 essay Crisis in Civilization, written days before his death, denounced the mechanisation of life that Western modernity had brought. Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj of 1909 was a sustained critique of industrialism that treated production as its own end. Vinoba Bhave's Sarvodaya tradition extended this through bhoodan and gramdan. The German economist E F Schumacher's Small is Beautiful of 1973, including its chapter on 'Buddhist Economics', argued that the purpose of economics is to maximise well-being with minimum consumption — the inverse of conventional growth maximisation. NITI Aayog's Holistic Progress Card for schools, piloted in 2024, takes a small but symbolic step in this direction: a child's progress is measured beyond marks. Amartya Sen's capability approach, developed across his career and crystallised in Development as Freedom (1999), offers a rigorous framework for thinking about growth as expansion of substantive freedoms rather than mere income.

A serious counter-view must be heard. For the 400 million Indians still in absolute poverty, growth is meaning — clean water, antibiotics, working electricity, escape from caste indignity, escape from gender violence. The development economist Deepak Lal warned in 1983 that growth-scepticism is a luxury of the satisfied. He was not wrong about the warning, even if he was wrong about its target. The case for growth in India is not the case for hedonic infinity; it is the case for material decency. The goal is not anti-growth — that abdication would betray the poor most. The goal is growth that knows what it is for: clean water before private jets, mental health before luxury cars, dignity before vanity. Growth is not the enemy; growth without orientation is. Liberalisation since 1991 has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; the question is what the next phase optimises for.

The institutional task is to redesign measurement and budgeting around well-being domains: health (physical and mental), education (substantive learning rather than enrolment alone), environment (air, water, biodiversity), time (leisure, family, sleep), inequality (gini, wealth concentration), and meaningful work. The United Nations Statistical Commission's 2025 framework on Beyond GDP indicators provides one template. India's Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Periodic Labour Force Survey, NFHS-6 and India Energy Outlook 2024 together generate the data that a well-being budget could draw on. The Karnataka government's experiment with Mahalaxmi guarantees, the Kerala model of social-spending-first development, and the Telangana Rythu Bandhu cash-transfer reflect different attempts to balance growth with human development.

The civilisational reframing matters because measurement shapes behaviour. What a republic counts, it cultivates; what it does not count, it allows to atrophy. If a child's screen-time replaces playground time and no one tallies the difference, the playground disappears. If urban tree cover declines and no Smart City scorecard penalises the decline, the tree cover continues to fall. If unpaid care work — overwhelmingly performed by women — never appears in GDP, gender inequity gets entrenched in the very arithmetic of progress.

The Bhagavad Gita 3.21 offers an old line that has not aged. 'Whatever the great person does, that the lesser will follow.' A 5-trillion-dollar economy is a means. Its end is whether the daughter of a Jharkhand iron-ore miner can dream beyond mere survival, whether her father retires without crippling debt, whether her mother is treated for chronic anaemia, whether the river that runs past their village is still drinkable. Meaning is the missing column in the spreadsheets, and adding it does not require abandoning the spreadsheets. It requires asking, at every budget cycle and every policy review, the question RFK posed in Kansas: what is all this growth for, and is the answer one the republic can defend in public? A treadmill no one can step off is not freedom. A direction worth pursuing — that is.