No chance at all. Nada, zero, none, hakuna
Let me remind you that India’s rise has been predicted for decades (just as China’s downfall) but the optimistic (or pessimistic in the case of China) predictions were always proven wrong.
Despite India’s growth, India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s and the gap between both has actually considerably widened in China’s favor.
India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth
The numbers on this are impressive:
- China graduates nearly twice as many STEM students as India
- China spends 2% of its GDP on R&D, India only 0.7%
4 of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies by revenue are Chinese; none are Indian
China produces over half of the world’s 5G infrastructure, India just 1%
China holds 65% of the world’s AI patents, compared with India’s 0.3%
China’s workforce is more productive than India’s because of 996.
I would remind you that while China has completely eliminated abject poverty, India still has high levels of poverty and malnutrition with India having for instance one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world surpassing even Africa’s most poor countries.
I would conclude by sharing another famous “oracle” by Lee Kuan Yew himself
Lee, said by “working with successive Indian prime ministers he hoped to help them make India strong enough to be a serious check on China”.
But he “concluded that this was not likely to happen.”
Why?
“The combination of India’s deep-rooted caste system that is the enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites’ unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led me to conclude that it would never be more than ‘the county of the future’—with that future never arriving at all.” Lee said
Do not talk about India and China in the same breath ever again