Hemant Mohapatra: India misses targets but its rise is inevitable (opens the source in a new tab)
- Lightspeed VC Hemant Mohapatra argues India sets big, round targets, people game them, and outcomes lag: Skill India trained 16.4M people with weak placement, and Ujjwala's 103M gas connections go to homes buying about 4.7 refills a year.
- Read like a VC portfolio, the misses fund the hits. PLI fell short in most sectors, yet iPhone exports grew to about Rs 2 lakh crore, and Jan Dhan accounts became the rails for UPI Unified Payments Interface: India's instant mobile payment system, run by NPCI..
- His test: keep the bounty but change what it pays for, moving targets from engineers trained to wafers shipped, connections to refills, and accounts to money actually moving.
- 24.5B
- UPI transactions, Aug 2026
- 103M
- Ujjwala LPG connections
- 5.3%
- in extreme poverty, 2022-23
Why it matters It swaps the scheme-by-scheme report card for a better question: not whether India hit a number, but whether each new target sits closer to a real outcome.
Other side Portfolio logic forgives misses after the fact, since winners can be picked to fit the story. Some costs are real: subsidised refills cut on low usage, and a manufacturing share of GDP that fell during PLI.