But even with this margin, it seems unlikely that India will do better than China in the near future. Actually, China is now very close to being an economic superpower, and it is this that seems to rattle Americans. India, on the other hand, has been able to reduce its share of farm incomes from 31 per cent in 1980 to 23 per cent last year. This means that India is today where China was 20 years ago, a big gap in the development parameters of the two countries. The main reason for this is that India has been forced to go slow because of certain political constraints, which are totally absent in China.
China is after all a dictatorship, while India is a democracy. and democracies always move slowly.
This does not mean that democracies are laggards while dictatorships are fast runners. The Soviet Union was also a fast runner, or was supposed to be one, but look what happened to it, when the chips were down. China may have been moving faster than India but there are more imbalances in the Chinese economy than there are in India, which makes its growth somewhat unstable. But this does not mean that China is about to fall by the wayside and India will overtake its giant neighbour, if she has not already done so. China's GDP is twice ours and its per capita income is also twice ours.