India Awakens

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Democracy aside, there is a second way in which India is the un-China--and it's not to India's credit. In most measures of modernization, China is way ahead. Last year per capita income in India was $3,300; in China it was $6,800. Prosperity and progress haven't touched many of the nearly 650,000 villages where more than two-thirds of India's population lives. Backbreaking, empty-stomach poverty, which China has been tackling successfully for decades, is still all too common in India. Education for women--the key driver of China's rise to become the workshop of the world--lags terribly in India. The nation has more people with HIV/AIDS than any other in the world, but until recently the Indian government was in a disgraceful state of denial about the epidemic. Transportation networks and electrical grids, which are crucial to industrial development and job creation, are so dilapidated that it will take many years to modernize them.

Yet the litany of India's comparative shortcomings omits a fundamental truth: China started first. China's key economic reforms took shape in the late 1970s, India's not until the early 1990s. But India is younger and freer than China. Many of its companies are already innovative world beaters. India is playing catch-up, for sure, but it has the skills, the people and the sort of hustle and dynamism that Americans respect, to do so. It deserves the new notice it has got in the U.S. We're all about to discover: this elephant can dance.