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Many strands of India’s population milestone
Columnist Sadanand Dhume noted that while there’s a fair amount of boosterism as far as India’s current economic performance, one has to be mindful of the distance it has yet to travel
The news that India’s population surpassed that of China’s prompted a flurry of stories and columns in leading global publications about whether this is truly “India’s moment” in the geopolitical spotlight. “But if you’re looking at it in terms of whether India is likely to catch up economically with China, let’s just say that India has one hell of a mountain to scale,” argued columnist Sadanand Dhume on this week’s Grand Tamasha podcast, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times.
Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal, joined Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution and host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the symbolic—and substantive—import of India’s population milestone. In addition to India’s population, the trio also discussed India’s democratic credentials and its foreign policy credibility more than a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Dhume noted that while there’s a fair amount of boosterism as far as India’s current economic performance, one has to be mindful of the distance it has yet to travel. “Look at urbanisation—China is about two-thirds urban, India is only about one-third urban. Look at female participation in the labour force; it’s roughly around 20 percent in India and it’s roughly three times that in China. Look at per capita income…it’s about almost six times higher in China than in India even though they were at the same level essentially as recently as 1990,” remarked Dhume.
Nevertheless, the moment is brimming with geopolitical import, noted Madan. The milestone symbolises India’s scale and serves as a reminder of what its rise means for the world, in terms of the decisions it makes both at home as well as on the world stage. Madan noted that there are only two countries in the history of the world—China and India—that have brought this kind of scale to bear on global economic and political debates.
But how India shapes these debates will depend in large measure on how it manages several demographic-induced challenges at home. “If you’re trying to look ahead into the next two, three or four decades, some of it is just economic catch-up—industrialisation, urbanisation, women in the labour force,” stated Dhume. “But the more profound questions are political: is India’s political system going to be supple enough to navigate these huge inequalities, not just between the educated and the illiterate, but also these growing inequalities between the richer parts of the country—which also happen to be the least populous—with the poor and populous Hindi heartland?
