India has 30-40% unemployment for graduates, India’s ‘growth’ rate is very cooked, it has a large informal sector and formal sector data is used to impute informal sector growth. Informal sector meanwhile has been destroyed by multiple self-inflicted and external shocks.

For India to grow:

1. Domestic private sector must be willing to spend: It is refusing to do so, they are swimming in profits, all they can do is rent-seek using state resources.

2. Foreign sector is unreliable, they can exploit India’s resources, and they have that’s how some of the decent growth occurred in the 2000s global bubble but it hasn’t translated to employment.

3. Government is unwilling to spend. I do believe that they legitimately believe in neoliberal propaganda of ‘Government is a household’.

Some blame Modi but his Government only continued the neoliberal legacy, the neoliberal policies hit the limit in 2011 or so.

This site is pretty good: https://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2025/09/18/i-mountains-of-cash/

China is the only country with a large population that successfully industrialized and grew using the external sector growth strategy (and that too with the help of the state). All the other Asian tigers had smaller population and thus needed less foreign investments to develop.

Do you mean achieving the level of industrialization in China? We have some Indian comrades here who know more than me on the topic, but here are my takes with respect to the success in China.

There are two aspects that were fundamental to the success of the reform and opening up.

First is land reform, which necessitated the abolishment of feudal landlords’ grip on the land, without which the government would face incredible obstacles when it comes to national planning. This was achieved as early as 1953 during the Three Socialist Transformations era as landlords were purged.

The same also happened in Western capitalist countries, for example in the US the government could use eminent domain to seize the necessary land to build federal highways in the 20th century, which were crucial for industrialization. The refusal of the government to evoke such powers in recent times to appease the landlords and lobbyist groups is also a primary reason why it is so difficult to build vast public transportation networks in the US today.

Ironically, China also faces new problems as the local governments themselves become the new landlords that have tied land finances to municipal budgets (a consequence of the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform as the decentralization of the powers left too much tax revenues in the hands of the local governments). This created a completely different set of problems in China though, where you have such excessive infrastructure building in China in recent years because of the prospect of rising land value as new infrastructure is built. This ultimately did not materialize, and so there are a lot of excess capacity that is simply wasted and unproductive.

Back to the topic, my understanding is that India simply has not achieved the level of land reform in China and in the West to allow for a coordinated level of national industrialization planning to take place. The rural conservative landlords simply will resist to prevent their influence and power from being eroded by the national government, so you have obstacles everywhere.

The second factor that is vital to the success of reform and opening up in China is the role of Chinese diasporas. What is not well known is that the early years of opening up was almost entirely supported and financed by wealthy Chinese diaspora businessmen from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the US and other Western countries who left the country since the late 19th century and have “made it” overseas.

Western corporations did not enter China en masse until the late 80s and the 90s. I didn’t make this up by the way, the Guangzhou government (the most important hub for China’s export industry) website itself stated that between 1979-1990, 80% of the foreign capital investment came from overseas Chinese.

This is simply a historical condition that I guess you can say, owed to Qin Shi Huang who united the Chinese civilization since 2000 years ago, as brutal and violent as it could be (for example, the whole concept of “collective punishment” central to the Legalist reform - what Western historians love to attribute as “Oriental despotism” in China - was, ironically, vital to the success of Qin’s unification of China).

Most Chinese diasporas, no matter where they live in the world today, will always feel a level of pride for being descendants of this great civilization - the only civilization in the world today that has remained uninterrupted for thousands of years. It is difficult to describe the nationalism and patriotism one could feel to their ancestral land of such an enduring civilization. A lot of the overseas Chinese donated both financially and materially during the anti-Japanese colonialism during WWII. Even the anti-CCP reactionaries cannot deny such feeling.

A lot of wealthy Chinese businessmen saw not only a business opportunity when China opened up in the 1970s, but also saw it as a way to reconnect with their ancestral land.

This is a key ingredient that many countries trying to emulate China’s reform model is missing.

Finally, I will leave you with a trivia of the day: What was the first foreign corporation to invest in China since the reform and opening up?

spoiler

Chareon Pokphand aka the CP Group in Thailand, aka Zheng Da in China, started by a pair of Chinese brothers who had made it in Thailand.

they might enable the India to rival China

Extremely doubtful. The Indian state is more interested in tearing itself apart with violent racism so that their capitalists can make a few more USD before it all falls apart than in serious development of any kind.

China and India are two nations destroyed by imperialism and colonialism which (somewhat) defeated those forces and gained full independence around the same time. The main difference is that China has had socialism, and India has had social democracy. We can see today the respective outcomes.