Has India Taken Off?

In recent times India has been getting a better international press than ever before.

When it comes to crafting national economic policy, few political leaders in the world have had the success of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. Whatever reservations one may have about his politics, it is remarkable how he steered Singapore from a poor nation to a fully industrialized one in three decades. He has also written on the economic problems of different nations with remarkable prescience. During his term as Prime Minister of Singapore he routinely expressed pessimism on India. ‘It was sad to see the gradual rundown of the country’, he wrote in his book, From Third World to First, and added in his inimitably undiplomatic style that the crockery at a formal government dinner was very bad and ‘one knife literally snapped in my hand and nearly bounced into my face.’

It therefore caused a stir when, in early April, on the occasion of the founding of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, he predicted that India will be propelled into the ‘front ranks’. In this speech, crammed with information and analysis, he argued that, over the next decades, ‘China and India will shake the world. … In some industries, [these countries] have already leapfrogged the rest of Asia.’