India Needs More Talent at the Top
The country may have more people than China. But it won’t become a major economic, scientific and technological power without more technocrats.
Modi’s followers attack bastions of educational privilege.
Photographer: Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images
In a world-historical shift, India is surpassing China to become the world’s most populous country. But the question often heard in recent days — whether India can realize its so-called demographic dividend and outperform ageing China economically — does not go far enough. More attention is due to a fundamental and oddly neglected issue: whether India’s government has the technocratic capacity to transform the country into a major economic, scientific and technological power like China.
For more than half a century since Mao Zedong’s calamitously anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution, well-educated leaders have mapped China’s own trajectory to modernization. Mao arrogantly devised quack solutions for China’s challenge of rapid industrialization, such as making steel in family backyards. But Mao’s colleagues began to check his ideological excesses even while he was alive.