Markets Magazine
India Rising, China Slowing Doesn’t Mean Modi Wins
India is poised to top China in population and economic growth. That's no guarantee Narendra Modi’s pro-business push will beat Xi Jinping’s consumption-heavy makeover in a regional contest with global consequences.
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Jim O’Neill still vividly recalls a 2006 road trip he made from India’s capital, New Delhi, to a new industrial city named Gurgaon. On a two-lane road jammed with cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, and animals, it took O’Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, two and a half hours to travel 30 kilometers, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July/August issue. “It was insane,” he says.
O’Neill, who’s now a British government minister, repeated the journey in February. This time, the drive, on a new highway to what’s now more of a suburb, was less than an hour. Even better, the hotel car provided free Wi-Fi—the first time he’d encountered this perk anywhere in the world. “It sort of sums up the changes in India,” he says.