Q.Explain briefly the contribution of the tertiary sector to India's Gross Domestic Product.

The tertiary sector has become the largest single contributor to India's national income over the last few decades.

India's Gross Value Added is divided among the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, and the relative share of each has changed substantially over time. At Independence, agriculture (the primary sector) was the dominant contributor. Since economic liberalisation in 1991, however, the tertiary sector has grown particularly fast — driven by finance, telecommunications, trade and, from the late 1990s onward, information technology and IT-enabled services — and has overtaken both agriculture and industry to become the largest contributor to GVA.

Based on the Government of India's National Accounts Statistics, the services sector has, in recent years, generally accounted for a little over half of total Gross Value Added (commonly cited in the broad range of roughly 53–55 per cent), with agriculture contributing under a fifth and industry making up the balance. These exact figures move somewhat from year to year and are periodically revised, so they should be understood as an approximate, illustrative order of magnitude rather than a fixed number.

What matters for this answer is the underlying trend: India's economic growth over the last three decades has been increasingly led by the tertiary sector, a pattern often referred to as 'services-led growth', which distinguishes India's development path from economies that industrialised (built a large secondary sector) before their services sector expanded.