Super Power?

Raghav Bahl has spent his working life as a journalist and as one of India's prominent entrepreneurs, and he has heard the same complaints again and again from foreign executives passing through. Why are Indian rules so flimsy and hard to follow? Why is the country so guarded about foreign investment? How does everyone speak such fluent English? The conversation almost always ends with a shrug and a comparison: it isn't like this in China. Super Power? takes that comparison seriously. The two economies are widely expected to shape the coming century together, yet on the ground they operate very differently. China has proved remarkably good at building infrastructure, and it pours close to half of its GDP into investment. India runs on another engine. More than half of its GDP comes from domestic consumption by a population of over a billion, and half of those people are under twenty-five, which gives the country a demographic edge. About 350 million Indians understand English, which makes India the largest English-using nation in the world. Bahl frames the contest as a race between China's hare and India's tortoise, and asks which of them is likelier to reach the finish first. The book is aimed at readers who want to understand how these two giants work, where each is strong or vulnerable, and how their rise is likely to change the course of world history.