Economic Survey 2026 wants pvt sector to marry commercial dynamism with a conscious contribution to nation building

India needs a private sector leadership that is comfortable with competition at global standards, that reinvests success into capability building rather than financial engineering, and that frames corporate ambition in terms of what it does for India’s productive base, employment quality and international standing, Economic Survey 2025-26 has said.

The Survey called for a private sector that is willing to accept longer investment horizons in innovation, skills, and quality; one that treats formalisation, productivity, and technological deepening as collective goods rather than optional strategies; and one that recognises its role in shaping social trust and institutional credibility.

“In a society undergoing rapid structural change, the private sector’s legitimacy will increasingly rest on its ability to marry commercial dynamism with a conscious contribution to nation building, not as a slogan, but as a guiding discipline in strategy, capital allocation and organisational culture”, the Survey said.

Citing the examples of several countries including Japan, Thailand, and Singapore, the Survey said a country’s transformation becomes most durable when business leaders see themselves not merely as beneficiaries of growth but as trustees of a larger developmental project.

“The most successful corporate histories in post-war America, Germany, Japan, and East Asia were marked by firms that invested ahead of immediate returns, treated technological capability and workforce upgrading as civic obligations, and derived legitimacy from strengthening national resilience, enhancing export competitiveness, and promoting social stability. Their pursuit of profit was not suspended; rather, it was embedded within a moral economy in which reputation, prestige, and long-term value were tied to advancing national capability rather than extracting short-term gains. The underlying ethic was one of stewardship: firms imagined themselves as institutions of the nation, not just participants in its markets”, the Survey said.

According to the Survey, the large Indian corporate sector occupies an intermediate position between two historical archetypes. “It has not functioned as a developmental partner to the state in the manner seen in late-industrialising East Asia, where firms actively demanded state competence and discipline. Nor has it behaved like the arm’s-length, rules bound corporate sector typical of mature Western economies. Instead, it operates in a hybrid zone where rents are available, enforcement is uneven, and political mediation substitutes for market discipline”, it notes.

The key structural characteristics that define Indian corporate sector are relative lack of willingness and appetite to invest efforts towards long-term risk absorption and becoming globally competitive and short capital allocation horizons, the Survey says.