According to Swaminathan Aiyar, by 2020, India will overtake china and the US on many parameters. It will also gain strong position in areas like in trade, political power, GDP growth rate. This would be due the growing strength of Indian literate workforce and ore/gas deposits. Following are key extracts and our views:
India will overtake China as the fastest-growing economy in the world. China will start aging and suffering from a declining workforce, and will be forced to revalue its currency. So its growth will decelerate, just as Japan decelerated in the 1990s after looking unstoppable in the 1980s. Having become the world’s second-biggest economy, China’s export-oriented model will erode sharply – the world will no longer be able to absorb its exports at the earlier pace. Meanwhile, India will gain demographically with a growing workforce that is more literate than ever before. The poorer Indian states will start catching up with the richer ones. This will take India’s GDP growth to 10% by 2020, while China’s growth will dip to 7-8%.
India will become the largest English-speaking nation in the world, overtaking the US. So, the global publishing industry will shift in a big way to India. Rupert Murdoch’s heirs will sell his collapsing media empire to Indian buyers. The New York Times will become a subsidiary of an Indian publishing giant.
Our view: The above view sounds good to hear thought but the biggest hurdle facing India is from its own people. A significant number of Indian population has got used to corrupt work practices, pervasive indiscipline and weak governance — this has to change substantially before anything that has been mentioned in the article happens.