India and China, with a combined population of 3 billion people, will reclaim their positions as economic giants in this century
Raghav Bahl is the founder of Network18, a media conglomerate that owns CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz, CNN-IBN, In.com, Moneycontrol and Forbes India. Bahl is one of the pioneers of television journalism in India and under his leadership CNBC-TV18 has become and remained the business channel of choice in India.
Bahl is an Economics graduate from St Stephens and did an MBA from University of Delhi. He worked first as a management consultant with AF Ferguson and later with American Express Bank before getting into media. Bahl also won the Sanskriti award for journalism in 1994.
Raghav Bahl’s book ‘Superpower?: The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise’ is forthcoming from Penguin Allen Lane.
Napolean once said, “Let China sleep, for when China wakes up, she will shake the world.”
China has woken up. It is investing nearly half its GDP — that’s simply unprecedented. No other economy, at no other time in history, has invested capital on that scale. To call this “hyper”-investment is like comparing the Sun’s luminosity to a street-lamp. At the peak of its economic miracle, Japan was investing only 30 percent plus of its GDP — but China is doing 50 percent!
The Indian Rupee largely floats against world currencies — it danced in a 25 percent band after Lehman’s collapse in 2008, without disrupting anything. A red rag is India’s weak government budget and rather high public debt at 80 percent of GDP — but here again, the highly vulnerable dollar loans are paltry by Asian standards. India is in a very sweet demographic spot, being the youngest country in the world — half a billion people are less than 25 years old, giving it a unique “demographic dividend” among peers. Ten of the world’s 30 fastest growing cities are in India — its urbanisation rate, at 30 percent, is accelerating. With 350 million people displaying a reasonable proficiency in English, it’s the largest English-using country in the world. Its judicial system is robustly based on English Common Law. It’s a genuine, albeit imperfect, democracy.
(This story appears in the 04 June, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)