In a world-historical shift, India is surpassing China to become the world’s most populous country. But the question often heard in recent days — whether India can realize its so-called demographic dividend and outperform ageing China economically — does not go far enough. More attention is due to a fundamental and oddly neglected issue: whether India’s government has the technocratic capacity to transform the country into a major economic, scientific and technological power like China.
Since Deng Xiaoping’s momentous tenure, China has seemed continuously able to tap its available intellectual potential no matter who is in power in Beijing. Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, argues in a forthcoming book that Chinese President Xi Jinping, widely considered more autocratic than his predecessors, has empowered a new generation of experts in information technology, aerospace, shipbuilding, 5G, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Many of these technocrats have accumulated decades of experience competing globally at China’s state-owned enterprises.
This is hardly because India lacks talent. A handful of educational institutions in India have produced what is arguably the most impressive global intelligentsia of any non-Western country. Indians today occupy senior positions across Western academic, financial, and corporate institutions. Indeed, the Chinese diaspora in the West, though longer established, cannot begin to match the strength, impact, and visibility of the Indian diaspora.
The occasional homecoming is rarely successful. Take, for instance, Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Invited in 2013 by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to head the Reserve Bank of India, Rajan returned to the US in 2016. His criticism of crony capitalism and ideological extremism in India clearly did not endear him to Singh’s successor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Facts and data in India are increasingly fudged; political expediency appears even to have blocked a routine national census that would shed light on India’s burgeoning population. It’s questionable whether a system of government that hinges on personalized power of the kind Modi wields can help accelerate India’s modernization beyond a point, no matter how many infrastructure projects he inaugurates.
Modi’s own educational credentials aren’t the issue. Nor is his Hindu nationalism an obstacle by itself. Pragmatic-minded nationalists can learn on the job.
Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
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