As a long time India bull and former professional investor in listed equities there, I would add three points:
1) a positive byproduct of the high cost of capital is that ROEs are also high, and also that because debt capital is scarce, banks remain filters, not funnels. Nor does the Indian government coerce capital into SOEs.
2) fraud and corruption are often posited as negatives for the investment and growth story. However all though these are easy to find, I suggest India’s greater transparency compared to China, as made them less universal.
3) while many countries have great technical universities, I wonder if any have the level of competitive entry as the Indian Institutes of Technology. The nearest equivalent I can think of is French engineering schools.
India has been so crippled by socialism that it has a huge runway to grow for decades. The recent labor reforms Noah cites are an example. Previously, firms with 100 or more employees needed government permission to lay off workers. The reforms increased this threshold to… 300. It’s like this everywhere you look, whether it’s high-level variables like urbanization and female labor force participation or low-level details like this layoff law. All that’s needed for them to grow is progressive unhobbling and there seems to be a lot of low hanging fruit to pick.
There is no discussion of the literal elephant in the room.
The rise of Hindutva ideology.
Just as Trump's has enabled the anti science wing of the Republican party to do immense damage to America's science infrastructure, India has a similar strain of people who genuinely believe that Ram was a real person and that India was making Bronze airplanes 8,000 years ago.
Those people are in power.
In addition, the Hindutva idea is that India is the herrenvolk, blood and soil nation for Hindus. This is in explicit opposition to the founding documents of the country.
In the 1920's, it wasn't good for America's economy that a black person in Louisiana could be lynched for "eyeballing" a white woman. In 2020's india, it's not good for India's economy that a Muslim person in Gujarat can be lynched for "eyeballing" a cow.
I don't disagree with any of the hopeful things in the article, but the bear case here is woefully under explored.
I think Noah has a blindspot where he doesn't like to look at the consequences when the high tech industrialists ally themselves and empower the anti science right.
Like for Trump and Elon, the hope was "Hey permitting reform! And Republicans being friendly to electric cars!"
The reality was "Massive destruction of state capacity and an attempt to murder America's world beating research university system."
Obviously, many of these vigilante groups are frankly ridiculous and insane. However, most of India's development happens in Maharasthra + the southern states, which are much more tolerant. I mean, America was powering ahead with industrialization while the South was regressive and backwards, so it's not like one developed region cannot pull a backwards one out of their own idiocy.
On the other hand, a lack of Hindu nationalism would also be extremely problematic. Muslims make up the second largest religion in India and are -- for lack of better words -- regressive. They demand for the continued incorporation of Sharia law in india which is basically poison for business and causes unnecessary resentment. Any attempt to fix this issue is met with accusations of Islamophobia. For example, the government just made it more difficult for the Muslims to seize land. That's right... before a few months ago, an Islamic board could eminent domain your land and appropriate for Islamic purposes using a dubious process judged only by Muslim imams, and the government would enforce this. The government made this process more difficult, and there were accusations of Islamophobia. As another example, India desperately needs more education. Minorities get federal money to start their own schools. Christians used this money to start schools and universities teaching science and mathematics. These are so popular that many non-Christians avail themselves of these schools. Muslims have basically none of this infrastructure and the blame lies with them. Instead they start madrassahs that teach the Quran. You cannot have a country where the 15% minority group chooses to eschew modern education and cries wolf everytime any attempt is made to fix this problem, while the whole world starts siding with them. Broadly speaking, the opposition party of India would let the Muslims regress into their Quran-learning, which would greatly hold India back.
That being said, Hindutva ideology will likely dissipate over time. Most people just don't care. I'm not so sure about radical Islam in India though.
I think India has a law and order issue in rural areas because it's hard to fund police in sparsely populated areas. Other than that, I do not think the situation in densely populated cities is like 1920s America and finding some anecdotal examples doesn't make it true.
I'm a little surprised to hear you say that "people just don’t believe that Indians, as a people, have what it takes to build a modern high-tech economy." Or rather, I'm surprised to hear the justification for this be put down to IQ statistics.
Maybe I'm not aware of the people making these arguments but I would put more stock in the argument that "because none of these countries has done it, a lot of people just assume that none of them can do it".
I find your arguments about the benefits of federalisation, democracy and a track record of economic growth quite convincing though.
One possible 'bear' that you don't address is environmental. We don't know how quickly temperatures will rise in the coming century (and I'm not confident in our ability to slow this rise quickly enough), and I certainly don't know how quickly this will convert into melting glaciers, but my understanding is that India is very dependent upon a limited number of sources of fresh water. i.e. India may be particularly vulnerable to climate change which could derail economic growth, to say the least.
Luckily for ocean-facing India there's increasingly capable desalination technology, coupled with a couple energy revolutions (solar, and likely nuclear) in progress. Ideally we would have no climate change. But with ingenuity and political will there can be straightforward adaptation to deal with problems as they arise.
I wonder if the bears have ever been to India. There'incredible energy there. IMO, the only things that could hold them back is government policies that stifle growth and the fact that it is just so many people.
You are absolutely right. Even I, a congenital cynic, am taken aback by the velocity, confidence, & energy now coursing through India. Of course, India contains multitudes. It is a place of unimaginable contrasts, and there is still ample institutional & personal reform that needs to happen. To grasp what is unfolding, one must step back to a 10,000-foot perspective and watch the system dynamic rather than pick at the weeds.
The bottom line: India is a civilisation reawakening to its historical role, and the world will have to adjust to that fact.
A good way to assess the “32 separate nations” factor may be to compare the capabilities of Indian federalism to those of the EU. I suspect the coordination and collaboration barriers are on the whole no worse and potentially better
Interesting article... every country has its challenges. China must deal with demographic issues, misaligned debt, currency, and some of the consequences of its industrial policy. In contrast, India has four fundamental issues which make progress difficult...
1) North/South Divide: When discussing Indian growth, it is driven by South India...which has better infrastructure, education, and governance. The North lacks all three, has a relatively rising population, and regressing in many ways. This is leading to an overall conflict around true federalism which is not going to be pretty.
2) Culture: India's strength is its deep cultural roots around family/tribe. This also creates challenges for progress on a broader front for investing in the common good. Example: The Indian government tax/funding structure is remarkably small, and of course, the role of women.
3) Services Headset: To date, growth in Indian economy has been focused on services. The domination of services has created a business risk profile which is not conducive to explosive growth. With the exception of a couple of places in the south (Bangalore, Hyderabad), entrepreneurship is more or less discouraged at the investor, customer, and employee (family pressure) level.
4) Agricultural Sector reforms: The US went through a painful process of agricultural reform in the late 1800s with a massive shift in productivity/ownership. India has not gone through this shift (neither has China). This sector holds a lot of political power to prevent these shifts.
Overall, the situation is changing for the positive, but it will take a couple of generations. The challenges are apparent in the ridiculous situation in major northern cities such as New Delhi with unhealthy air... a persistent problem with very high costs.
I don’t think your north/south divide is correct. Most northern states are doing very nicely, eg Punjab, Gujarat, Harayana, the NCR etc. The problems are in the “cow belt”, ie UP, and the East, such as Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkand,
fair point ... though the "cow belt" is hard to ignore. Also, the environmental debt is also going to be an issue... especially in the Harayana/NCR area.
Curious about (4). I definitely agree that India needs a serious prescription of land reform, especially when it comes to improving the quality of property rights and some level of land redistribution (especially for the mass of below-subsistence farmers). Agrarian reform is a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for economic development and industrialization, especially if we're talking about facilitating greater urbanization. But I'm not quite sure how China suffers from this similar problem: China did the land reform strategy in two (discontinuous and unsequenced) steps, first under the Maoist regime and then later under Deng's reformist period.
As I understand it, average size of a farm in china is under 2 hectors. This makes large scale farming difficult. The result is that basic grains are imported (US/Brazil) and china is one of the bigger exporters of second-tier agricultural products (pigs).
Gotcha. China's main challenge going forward is going to be transforming smallholders into either (A) big commercial farmers or (B) future urban workers/residents. (A) might happen organically through shifts in the domestic agricultural market, but (B) hinges on making reforms to the hukou system and increasing domestic Chinese consumption.
One thing that everyone forgets about India is just how terrible and insane Indian economic policy was until 1991. It was so incredibly bad (toothpaste was taxed as a luxury item; you went to jail if you produced too much) that the runway for India is gigantic. Just going from abysmal to awful in terms of economic policy is enough for 50 years of growth. I'm writing an entire series on this issue. Check it out if interested. https://www.substack.com/@samirvarma. I'm 59. In my lifetime, I would be stunned if it isn't at least an upper middle income country. No magic is needed for that.
I've been saying this for years: India isn't the new China, it's the new US. About a century on from the original Cold War, I expect the world will be dominated by a similar Cold War, between a dour, declining, centrally planned officially-communist autocracy, and a vibrant, rich, culturally dominant capitalist democracy, chaotic and sometimes wracked by ethnic conflict, as any diverse country is, but unmistakably the most powerful *and* best country in the world. The US will be like the UK by that point - once we ruled the world, and we're still doing pretty well, but there are other great powers now. It's hard to feel optimistic about global liberalism and democracy right now, but if there's hope, it lies with India.
My sense is that India has already been growing their economy, and that India is also industrializing. I think the bigger question is its fragmentation, its internal religious war against Muslims, and another war with Pakistan or China always looms.
Its extreme poverty and agricultural heritage will not change easily, as they did in China. That said, we know which set of immigrants are the most successful. That would be the immigrants from India. We are taking the best and brightest, and if that continues, our country will be far better off. Brain drain is an issue for India. Its cash-on-demand health care and lack of public sanitation are problems. The list of India’s problems is long, but it has a world-class intellectual population and the world's largest middle class. It also has the best Internet swindlers on the planet.
I don't disagree with the idea that India will be able to grow their economy, even per capita, for a while longer. The more interesting though, is the question what this will look like. For some reason I don't think development in India will develop in the same way as China (with massive infrastructure across the country), instead there will likely be more development around urban areas, and not so much in the rest of the country (this happens everywhere already, but I think this will become more pronounced in the future and especially India, where in some regions even literacy rates are still low, with maybe a bit of solarpunk in those distant regions).
The question after that is how long that'll last. If a country like India would develop to levels of consumption as they have in the US, or even in Europe, demand for resources and energy will increase by a lot. Add to that continuing growth in China, Africa, and other parts of Asia, and before you know it we will each be struggling to get our hands on the last resources our planet may provide us with.
The chorus of 'reply-guys' and professional naysayers will continue to speak as though India were an ambitious newcomer pleading for entry into the modern world, when in truth they are confronting a civilisation that is resuming its natural trajectory. India held a central place in global life for most of human history, shaping philosophy, mathematics, literature, and material prosperity, and the long interruption came from the violence of Muslim invasions and later colonisation rather than any intrinsic deficiency. What we see now is a restoration of historical continuity rather than the creation of something unprecedented.
India’s rise draws strength from a young population, a growing technological & scientific culture, and a civilisational identity that has survived unthinkable pressures over millennia. Obstacles will certainly appear and periods of slowdown will occur, yet these are merely surface disturbances on a deeper current that is carrying the country forward. The trend, observed over a meaningful span of time, points in only one direction.
The racist Groypers who fulminate on social media, convinced that India’s ascent is impossible, resemble rats chittering in a cellar while proclaiming that they have charted the world above. Their provincial fantasies are already obsolete, for they lack even the most basic acquaintance with Indian history (or any history, for that matter), and they cannot imagine that the centre of gravity in world affairs is shifting before their eyes.
India is reclaiming the civilisational presence that once defined it, and the rest of the world will adjust to this reality in due course, whether it likes it or not.
I dunno. China is another place that transparently sees itself as a "civilization-state" and they've done pretty well all considered. I mean pobody's nerfect, but it's definitely at least a contender.
All right, reply-guy. The difficulty you seem to have with holding more than a single thought in mind explains the quality of your conclusions about “civilization.”
on the bear side: subcontinental ppls had low literacy rates in 1900 when much of e asia (korea, japan) did not. so the human capital problem isn't trivial
but the main reason for my comment is i'm really curious about the idea there might be a legit 'pan-indian' national identity developing in a real way due to urbanization and mobility. might break down the problem of communalism in the 21st century...
Others have mentioned Hindu extremism and cultural/linguistic diversity as possible hindrances to growth. What's often not mentioned is the collection of antiquated and cumbersome land ownership laws, which tend to slow down development or empower gangsters ("land mafia") as the effective brokers of the system.
What about the low educational levels of the labour force? The Economist highlighted the two different approaches to education between India and China in Is India’s education system the root of its problems?
I do think education is a problem, but I don't agree that college is the main issue now. The rural population needs better basic literacy and numeracy to allow them to work in factories and urban settings. Reallocating between social science and STEM at the college level will eventually be important, but right now the entire issue with college-level STEM skills is demand; check out the last sentence of the Economist article, when they note that only a few STEM graduates can find STEM jobs right now.
India has always underinvested in primary education (government/public). The reason it still produces enough college grads is because of the private school revolution from the late 60s and 70s that feed into the college system.
First, if one looks into the history of arts and sciences in India, Persia, et alia, there is no reason to think these societies are any less intelligence than Western countries. India is poised to become a significant battery manufacturer. If the Trump administration wants to keep a Medieval barber running the NIH, when the next pandemic hits, the world should look to India. It’s the leading producer of vaccines. Many Western pharmaceutical corporations lacked interest in vaccines because they weren’t big money-makers. It wasn’t until Operation Warp Speed threw $200 million at a handful of U.S. pharmaceutical corporations that they proceeded with mRNA vaccines. I would think India is poised, with enough FDI, to become a lifesaver for a pandemic vaccine:
One major pharmaceutical executive in India donated millions of dollars of needed supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when Western countries no longer manufactured basic supplies (masks, needles, vials, etc.). Name one American pharmaceutical executive that donated millions to the Covid-19 response. In fact, executives at Moderna, one of the beneficiaries of Operation Warp Speed funding, changed their stock-vesting calendar so they could cash-in much earlier. Lovely people. Americans are arrogant in re other cultures and have very short memories.
As a long time India bull and former professional investor in listed equities there, I would add three points:
1) a positive byproduct of the high cost of capital is that ROEs are also high, and also that because debt capital is scarce, banks remain filters, not funnels. Nor does the Indian government coerce capital into SOEs.
2) fraud and corruption are often posited as negatives for the investment and growth story. However all though these are easy to find, I suggest India’s greater transparency compared to China, as made them less universal.
3) while many countries have great technical universities, I wonder if any have the level of competitive entry as the Indian Institutes of Technology. The nearest equivalent I can think of is French engineering schools.
Bumped to the main post!
India has been so crippled by socialism that it has a huge runway to grow for decades. The recent labor reforms Noah cites are an example. Previously, firms with 100 or more employees needed government permission to lay off workers. The reforms increased this threshold to… 300. It’s like this everywhere you look, whether it’s high-level variables like urbanization and female labor force participation or low-level details like this layoff law. All that’s needed for them to grow is progressive unhobbling and there seems to be a lot of low hanging fruit to pick.
There is no discussion of the literal elephant in the room.
The rise of Hindutva ideology.
Just as Trump's has enabled the anti science wing of the Republican party to do immense damage to America's science infrastructure, India has a similar strain of people who genuinely believe that Ram was a real person and that India was making Bronze airplanes 8,000 years ago.
Those people are in power.
In addition, the Hindutva idea is that India is the herrenvolk, blood and soil nation for Hindus. This is in explicit opposition to the founding documents of the country.
In the 1920's, it wasn't good for America's economy that a black person in Louisiana could be lynched for "eyeballing" a white woman. In 2020's india, it's not good for India's economy that a Muslim person in Gujarat can be lynched for "eyeballing" a cow.
I don't disagree with any of the hopeful things in the article, but the bear case here is woefully under explored.
I think Noah has a blindspot where he doesn't like to look at the consequences when the high tech industrialists ally themselves and empower the anti science right.
Like for Trump and Elon, the hope was "Hey permitting reform! And Republicans being friendly to electric cars!"
The reality was "Massive destruction of state capacity and an attempt to murder America's world beating research university system."
Obviously, many of these vigilante groups are frankly ridiculous and insane. However, most of India's development happens in Maharasthra + the southern states, which are much more tolerant. I mean, America was powering ahead with industrialization while the South was regressive and backwards, so it's not like one developed region cannot pull a backwards one out of their own idiocy.
On the other hand, a lack of Hindu nationalism would also be extremely problematic. Muslims make up the second largest religion in India and are -- for lack of better words -- regressive. They demand for the continued incorporation of Sharia law in india which is basically poison for business and causes unnecessary resentment. Any attempt to fix this issue is met with accusations of Islamophobia. For example, the government just made it more difficult for the Muslims to seize land. That's right... before a few months ago, an Islamic board could eminent domain your land and appropriate for Islamic purposes using a dubious process judged only by Muslim imams, and the government would enforce this. The government made this process more difficult, and there were accusations of Islamophobia. As another example, India desperately needs more education. Minorities get federal money to start their own schools. Christians used this money to start schools and universities teaching science and mathematics. These are so popular that many non-Christians avail themselves of these schools. Muslims have basically none of this infrastructure and the blame lies with them. Instead they start madrassahs that teach the Quran. You cannot have a country where the 15% minority group chooses to eschew modern education and cries wolf everytime any attempt is made to fix this problem, while the whole world starts siding with them. Broadly speaking, the opposition party of India would let the Muslims regress into their Quran-learning, which would greatly hold India back.
That being said, Hindutva ideology will likely dissipate over time. Most people just don't care. I'm not so sure about radical Islam in India though.
Is India any more nationalist than China?
No. There's lots of open dissenters in India of all religions.
I think India has a law and order issue in rural areas because it's hard to fund police in sparsely populated areas. Other than that, I do not think the situation in densely populated cities is like 1920s America and finding some anecdotal examples doesn't make it true.
Very interesting. I would tend to agree with you.
I'm a little surprised to hear you say that "people just don’t believe that Indians, as a people, have what it takes to build a modern high-tech economy." Or rather, I'm surprised to hear the justification for this be put down to IQ statistics.
Maybe I'm not aware of the people making these arguments but I would put more stock in the argument that "because none of these countries has done it, a lot of people just assume that none of them can do it".
I find your arguments about the benefits of federalisation, democracy and a track record of economic growth quite convincing though.
One possible 'bear' that you don't address is environmental. We don't know how quickly temperatures will rise in the coming century (and I'm not confident in our ability to slow this rise quickly enough), and I certainly don't know how quickly this will convert into melting glaciers, but my understanding is that India is very dependent upon a limited number of sources of fresh water. i.e. India may be particularly vulnerable to climate change which could derail economic growth, to say the least.
Luckily for ocean-facing India there's increasingly capable desalination technology, coupled with a couple energy revolutions (solar, and likely nuclear) in progress. Ideally we would have no climate change. But with ingenuity and political will there can be straightforward adaptation to deal with problems as they arise.
I wonder if the bears have ever been to India. There'incredible energy there. IMO, the only things that could hold them back is government policies that stifle growth and the fact that it is just so many people.
You are absolutely right. Even I, a congenital cynic, am taken aback by the velocity, confidence, & energy now coursing through India. Of course, India contains multitudes. It is a place of unimaginable contrasts, and there is still ample institutional & personal reform that needs to happen. To grasp what is unfolding, one must step back to a 10,000-foot perspective and watch the system dynamic rather than pick at the weeds.
The bottom line: India is a civilisation reawakening to its historical role, and the world will have to adjust to that fact.
A good way to assess the “32 separate nations” factor may be to compare the capabilities of Indian federalism to those of the EU. I suspect the coordination and collaboration barriers are on the whole no worse and potentially better
Interesting article... every country has its challenges. China must deal with demographic issues, misaligned debt, currency, and some of the consequences of its industrial policy. In contrast, India has four fundamental issues which make progress difficult...
1) North/South Divide: When discussing Indian growth, it is driven by South India...which has better infrastructure, education, and governance. The North lacks all three, has a relatively rising population, and regressing in many ways. This is leading to an overall conflict around true federalism which is not going to be pretty.
2) Culture: India's strength is its deep cultural roots around family/tribe. This also creates challenges for progress on a broader front for investing in the common good. Example: The Indian government tax/funding structure is remarkably small, and of course, the role of women.
3) Services Headset: To date, growth in Indian economy has been focused on services. The domination of services has created a business risk profile which is not conducive to explosive growth. With the exception of a couple of places in the south (Bangalore, Hyderabad), entrepreneurship is more or less discouraged at the investor, customer, and employee (family pressure) level.
4) Agricultural Sector reforms: The US went through a painful process of agricultural reform in the late 1800s with a massive shift in productivity/ownership. India has not gone through this shift (neither has China). This sector holds a lot of political power to prevent these shifts.
Overall, the situation is changing for the positive, but it will take a couple of generations. The challenges are apparent in the ridiculous situation in major northern cities such as New Delhi with unhealthy air... a persistent problem with very high costs.
I don’t think your north/south divide is correct. Most northern states are doing very nicely, eg Punjab, Gujarat, Harayana, the NCR etc. The problems are in the “cow belt”, ie UP, and the East, such as Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkand,
fair point ... though the "cow belt" is hard to ignore. Also, the environmental debt is also going to be an issue... especially in the Harayana/NCR area.
Curious about (4). I definitely agree that India needs a serious prescription of land reform, especially when it comes to improving the quality of property rights and some level of land redistribution (especially for the mass of below-subsistence farmers). Agrarian reform is a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for economic development and industrialization, especially if we're talking about facilitating greater urbanization. But I'm not quite sure how China suffers from this similar problem: China did the land reform strategy in two (discontinuous and unsequenced) steps, first under the Maoist regime and then later under Deng's reformist period.
As I understand it, average size of a farm in china is under 2 hectors. This makes large scale farming difficult. The result is that basic grains are imported (US/Brazil) and china is one of the bigger exporters of second-tier agricultural products (pigs).
Gotcha. China's main challenge going forward is going to be transforming smallholders into either (A) big commercial farmers or (B) future urban workers/residents. (A) might happen organically through shifts in the domestic agricultural market, but (B) hinges on making reforms to the hukou system and increasing domestic Chinese consumption.
yes... though this is not an easy thing to do... see Europe, Japan, etc...
One thing that everyone forgets about India is just how terrible and insane Indian economic policy was until 1991. It was so incredibly bad (toothpaste was taxed as a luxury item; you went to jail if you produced too much) that the runway for India is gigantic. Just going from abysmal to awful in terms of economic policy is enough for 50 years of growth. I'm writing an entire series on this issue. Check it out if interested. https://www.substack.com/@samirvarma. I'm 59. In my lifetime, I would be stunned if it isn't at least an upper middle income country. No magic is needed for that.
I've been saying this for years: India isn't the new China, it's the new US. About a century on from the original Cold War, I expect the world will be dominated by a similar Cold War, between a dour, declining, centrally planned officially-communist autocracy, and a vibrant, rich, culturally dominant capitalist democracy, chaotic and sometimes wracked by ethnic conflict, as any diverse country is, but unmistakably the most powerful *and* best country in the world. The US will be like the UK by that point - once we ruled the world, and we're still doing pretty well, but there are other great powers now. It's hard to feel optimistic about global liberalism and democracy right now, but if there's hope, it lies with India.
I agree with you. India is more like America, down to its founding and religious habits.
That's been my optimistic view since about 2005. I'm less optimistic since 2020.
My sense is that India has already been growing their economy, and that India is also industrializing. I think the bigger question is its fragmentation, its internal religious war against Muslims, and another war with Pakistan or China always looms.
Its extreme poverty and agricultural heritage will not change easily, as they did in China. That said, we know which set of immigrants are the most successful. That would be the immigrants from India. We are taking the best and brightest, and if that continues, our country will be far better off. Brain drain is an issue for India. Its cash-on-demand health care and lack of public sanitation are problems. The list of India’s problems is long, but it has a world-class intellectual population and the world's largest middle class. It also has the best Internet swindlers on the planet.
I don't disagree with the idea that India will be able to grow their economy, even per capita, for a while longer. The more interesting though, is the question what this will look like. For some reason I don't think development in India will develop in the same way as China (with massive infrastructure across the country), instead there will likely be more development around urban areas, and not so much in the rest of the country (this happens everywhere already, but I think this will become more pronounced in the future and especially India, where in some regions even literacy rates are still low, with maybe a bit of solarpunk in those distant regions).
The question after that is how long that'll last. If a country like India would develop to levels of consumption as they have in the US, or even in Europe, demand for resources and energy will increase by a lot. Add to that continuing growth in China, Africa, and other parts of Asia, and before you know it we will each be struggling to get our hands on the last resources our planet may provide us with.
I agree with your assessment.
The chorus of 'reply-guys' and professional naysayers will continue to speak as though India were an ambitious newcomer pleading for entry into the modern world, when in truth they are confronting a civilisation that is resuming its natural trajectory. India held a central place in global life for most of human history, shaping philosophy, mathematics, literature, and material prosperity, and the long interruption came from the violence of Muslim invasions and later colonisation rather than any intrinsic deficiency. What we see now is a restoration of historical continuity rather than the creation of something unprecedented.
India’s rise draws strength from a young population, a growing technological & scientific culture, and a civilisational identity that has survived unthinkable pressures over millennia. Obstacles will certainly appear and periods of slowdown will occur, yet these are merely surface disturbances on a deeper current that is carrying the country forward. The trend, observed over a meaningful span of time, points in only one direction.
The racist Groypers who fulminate on social media, convinced that India’s ascent is impossible, resemble rats chittering in a cellar while proclaiming that they have charted the world above. Their provincial fantasies are already obsolete, for they lack even the most basic acquaintance with Indian history (or any history, for that matter), and they cannot imagine that the centre of gravity in world affairs is shifting before their eyes.
India is reclaiming the civilisational presence that once defined it, and the rest of the world will adjust to this reality in due course, whether it likes it or not.
Generally, seeing yourself as a "civilization" is not good for you. It allows you to dwell on past glories rather than dealing with current problems.
I dunno. China is another place that transparently sees itself as a "civilization-state" and they've done pretty well all considered. I mean pobody's nerfect, but it's definitely at least a contender.
All right, reply-guy. The difficulty you seem to have with holding more than a single thought in mind explains the quality of your conclusions about “civilization.”
on the bear side: subcontinental ppls had low literacy rates in 1900 when much of e asia (korea, japan) did not. so the human capital problem isn't trivial
but the main reason for my comment is i'm really curious about the idea there might be a legit 'pan-indian' national identity developing in a real way due to urbanization and mobility. might break down the problem of communalism in the 21st century...
Others have mentioned Hindu extremism and cultural/linguistic diversity as possible hindrances to growth. What's often not mentioned is the collection of antiquated and cumbersome land ownership laws, which tend to slow down development or empower gangsters ("land mafia") as the effective brokers of the system.
What about the low educational levels of the labour force? The Economist highlighted the two different approaches to education between India and China in Is India’s education system the root of its problems?
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/11/28/is-indias-education-system-the-root-of-its-problems
It’s a sobering read. Yes, only greenfield FDI can save India but quality of life is much lower in India than Southeast Asia or Japan.
I do think education is a problem, but I don't agree that college is the main issue now. The rural population needs better basic literacy and numeracy to allow them to work in factories and urban settings. Reallocating between social science and STEM at the college level will eventually be important, but right now the entire issue with college-level STEM skills is demand; check out the last sentence of the Economist article, when they note that only a few STEM graduates can find STEM jobs right now.
India has always underinvested in primary education (government/public). The reason it still produces enough college grads is because of the private school revolution from the late 60s and 70s that feed into the college system.
First, if one looks into the history of arts and sciences in India, Persia, et alia, there is no reason to think these societies are any less intelligence than Western countries. India is poised to become a significant battery manufacturer. If the Trump administration wants to keep a Medieval barber running the NIH, when the next pandemic hits, the world should look to India. It’s the leading producer of vaccines. Many Western pharmaceutical corporations lacked interest in vaccines because they weren’t big money-makers. It wasn’t until Operation Warp Speed threw $200 million at a handful of U.S. pharmaceutical corporations that they proceeded with mRNA vaccines. I would think India is poised, with enough FDI, to become a lifesaver for a pandemic vaccine:
https://neosciencehub.com/india-supplies-70-of-who-vaccines-and-14-of-us-generic-medicines/
One major pharmaceutical executive in India donated millions of dollars of needed supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when Western countries no longer manufactured basic supplies (masks, needles, vials, etc.). Name one American pharmaceutical executive that donated millions to the Covid-19 response. In fact, executives at Moderna, one of the beneficiaries of Operation Warp Speed funding, changed their stock-vesting calendar so they could cash-in much earlier. Lovely people. Americans are arrogant in re other cultures and have very short memories.