When Indians talk about China, many fall back on what is essentially a tortoise-and-hare rendering of their relative performance. The story goes something like this: “Sure, China has its 30-year record of double-digit growth, its gleaming skyscrapers and its eight-lane superhighways. But India has the ‘soft architecture', the democracy, the rule of law and the freedom of speech that provide shock absorbers and make its economic prospects more enduring.” The implication is that, while authoritarian China may have raced out of the traps, sooner or later it will falter. India, playing the long game, will keep up a measured pace and one day surpass it.
If India is indeed the tortoise, its performance is all too convincing. In 1991, the year Indian reforms got going, its per capita income was roughly the same as China's. Today, China's is more than three times higher. It is not that India has been terribly slow. Indeed, in the 1990s, it finally sloughed off its lacklustre “Hindu rate” of growth and began to expand at a halfway decent clip of 5.5 per cent a year. From 2000, that notched up higher still – to about 7.5 per cent. The only problem – when it comes to comparisons – is that China has done even better, expanding at 10 per cent a year over the same period. By the magic of compound growth, it has streaked ahead.
One does not need to accept the tortoise-and-hare analogy to believe that India, too, has a reasonable sho