The expression “Hindu rate of growth” reflected a colonial mindset that linked India’s slow economic performance in earlier decades to the faith and identity of its people, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

“The term Hindu rate of growth was used when India was struggling for 2–3 per cent growth,” the PM said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. “Our entire civilisation was given a tag of unproductivity and poverty using this term. No one found it communal back then.”

What does the expression mean? Who coined it?

What is the Hindu rate of growth?

The term “Hindu” in the Hindu rate of growth does not, in fact, have a negative connotation. According to The New Oxford Companion to Economics in India , economist Raj Krishna coined the expression as “a polemical device intended

See Full Page