By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
An Important tweet on May 6 by Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta on India becoming the world’s fourth largest economy went totally unnoticed. She quoted the IMF report to state that India has surpassed Japan to take the fourth position, an important milestone that may realize Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of achieving $ 5 trillion economy in the next few years.
Why did it happen? There may be many reasons but the fact was that a large group of electronic and print media including economic newspapers didn’t take this development very seriously. Even on last Saturday, when NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam held a press conference to highlight the same facts, the Indian media didn’t show any enthusiasm in the news story. The media waited till Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami took to X to laud the achievement. After Dhami’s tweet, some media outlets started publishing the story on their web editions. Some of the newspapers eventually carried the story in the May 26 edition.
One other reason could be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s preoccupation in the aftermath of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack which left 26 people dead. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is yet to issue any statement on this important development after IMF’s April 2025 world Economic Outlook projected that India’s gross domestic product (GDP) for 2025 would reach $ 4.187 trillion taking over Japan’s $ 4.186 trillion GDP for the same year. India is now poised to displace Germany from the third rank in the next 2 to 3 years, Subrahmanyam claimed.
A good rule of thumb is that a news story should not wait! It must be published immediately with all the facts available at that time. The reports about India’s quest for a $ 5 trillion economy have been widely covered by the most of the media organizations from time to time quoting the Prime Minister’s speeches at various places.
Some people might be thinking that a country where 80 crore people are dependent on the government for food, these figures are just a mirage in a desert. But the question arises If India becoming the fourth largest economy is no news then why the media organizations were covering all those stories about $5 trillion economy during the past three years. In 2021, BBC carried a story saying Modi’s ambition to make India a five trillion dollar economy is a “pipe dream”. If BBC can carry such story then why can’t the Indian media do it also? At least, the media can question its significance.
Senior Journalist Charles Issac took a cautious view on the issue and said as the economy grows it should translate into improvement in lives of people and should not end up fattening only a handful of the rich. Some journalists called for inclusive growth that delivers social benefits and tackle inequalities spreading benefits more fairly between people and places.