Over the past two decades, India’s economy has made sustained progress on scale, size and pace. Large inflows of FDI, rising foreign exchange reserves and a flourishing capital market created a positive economic environment. This resulted in the acceleration of its growth for more than 7% per year since 1997. Currently, India can be fairly characterized as an emerging economic power with an important amount of human and natural resources and furthermore with a huge knowledge base. Additionally, the economic liberalization and the structural reformation of the country transformed it into an open-market economy.

India has a diverse economy that includes both traditional and modern sectors of the market. From village farming to modern agriculture and from handicrafts to a wide range of modern industries, India’s economy can be fairly characterized as a mixture of tradition and modernization. Thus, the most important aspect of the economical status-quo of the country is that has entered the hi-tech market. By capitalizing on large numbers of well-educated employees, skilled in the English language, India managed to become a major exporter of software services and software workers. Therefore, the country emerged as a global player in information technology, business process outsourcing and telecommunications.     

Despite robust economic growth, India continues to face significant socio-economical problems. The economic development that has been achieved widened the economic inequality across the country. The gap between urban and rural areas, prosperous and lagging states and skilled and low-skilled workers broadened. It is indicative that India’s richest states now have incomes that are five times higher than those of the poorest states. Of course, Indian authorities are constantly trying to diminish the pool of poor people so as the country to cross the threshold and join the ranks of the world’s middle-income countries.

Education is diachronically an open issue for India. Currently a significant progress has been made in getting more children, especially girls, into primary schools. Since 2001, the government’s flagship elementary education program, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, has helped to bring some 20 million children into school. According to the Government, less than 5 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 now remain out of school, a fixture that can be fairly characterized as positive, if we take into consideration the history of the country.  
 
India is also facing economical structural problems. Some of them are: inadequate infrastructure, bureaucracy, corruption, labor market rigidities, regulatory and foreign investment controls and high fiscal deficits.
India is a fast emerging economic power. Economists predict that by 2020 will be among the leading economies of the world. Nevertheless, is still facing many major socio-economic problems that must be resolved.