Yes and No.
To my very inaccurate knowledge of India's history and current development, I don't think being a democratic society or not has
too much to do with India's progress.
India's biggest hurdle of development is not rooted in any system, but rather in cultural identity. The layers of your social structure have never been touched, your elites stays elites and underprivillieged stays underprvillieged, be it independence or openning up, no major movement in social life have ever shaked the core of the status quo in your political configuration.
It is unfair to say that india has never been changed since British installed a governor to rule the subcontinent, but statement holds true in many aspects, putting shri into office actually does not mean anything vital.
With that being said, I think a paradigm shift in culture should be put into your schedule among the top list items, other lesser important issues such as choice of instruments to realize this goal (Be it democracy or China style soft authoritarian) will follow up automatically once objectives are set.
From an outsider's view, you have to strengthen your second sector in a big scale. Forget about the world office's pink dream, reinforce your infrastructure and industrialize your country. industrilization will bring you a population with self consciousness, discipline. and REAL sense of social equality. Only when you have this kind of people can you emancipate your rurual population, your women, and your lower castes, can you make them citizen instead of "surplus of active Indians"( I came to an article by one of your scholars who claimed there are only 100 million Indian are actually Indian, with this kind of mentality in your elite class, how can your society progress?)
WIth China restructuring its industry, there are enormous chances india can uitlize, even some are labor intensive manufactures, you should just take them and implant them. and with Japan aging out, Indian can also take over some of their sectors, don't look down upon these dirty jobs, Japanese did that, Korean did that, I see no reason why Idian is too proud of doing them.
Short thoughts short, it really does not matter being democratic or not, it matters if you want to break up your old cultural identity with industrialization and build up a brand new one.
See, Democracy is the only system that can keep india united.70 percentage of indian's don,t understand the language spoken by each other.So responsible regional unit leaders of national political parties uniting in a system in DELHI give some kind of sense of INDIA to the common man.
Also free democracy ensures free and fair press,fair and autonomous supreme court, autonomous election commision, And gives a sense of fairplay so that pent up feeling of anger against politicians can be released safely with out breaking the nation.
In reality for a poor man forming 30 percent of population tilting this system is beyond his reach.But somehoew sense of fairplay is there.
Take the recent spectrum scam in telecom sector if it is not for the supreme court country would have been robbed of 20 billion dollars in single deal.But no one has been punished and all the accused are scotfree
SInce these systems are too lax corrupt rarely get punished ,that is the main problem in INDIA.Legal system is intently kept cumbersome by the ruling class.In US it is not like that.Justice is swift.But in india court cases drag on for 15 years even for a simple civil dispute that has no complexity.
The NHERU family rule (though elected in free and fair elections)was tilted towards socialism not free market.We started liberalisation ,and economic reform only in 1990s with Narashima rao government,you started it in the 70s with DENG.That is the real reason for the gap.Also population growth is not strictly controllable in india.
Still people GET ELECTED TO POSITIONS because their fathers held the position and since they know the system inside out they start the corrupt practice from day one.The coal scam is another instance of the robbery, with coal mines auctioned at a throw away price to private players for lease.
But due to free and fair press these corruptions come to light,and if cases are filed in court against them massive scams get scrapped.But scams worth 100 million dollars sail through under the radar,whichever political party ,there is no difference.This will be the real challenge to indian democraacy,these proliferating corruption and scams and nothing else.
But in china due to media censorship without the rulers nod ,no scams come to light ,that is the difference.
I do dream of a day when someone like OBAMA(whatever his policies may be) with no family connections and pampered background comes o power through his own personal integerity and honesty.
That will be the day of triumph for indian democracy
Average Indian earn more than their Chinese counterpart. China has the world cheapest labor, cost of labor is much lower than in India..
Take Television for example, this time the US initiated an anti-dumping war against Chinese TV exporters by using indian made TV's price.
China's price is lower due to Chinese Labor is much lower than that of India, since in China, other cost of making a TV set is much higher.
Manufacture workers for exemple, Chinese workers earns less than Indian workers, some joint ventures open their factory in China due to
they can pay the workers with less wage. They can barely survive in India since we don't have as hard working people either do we have
some one willing to work with such a low pay.
The cost of labor is going up,believe me or not a carpenter working in a small tier two city gets a third of software engineers pay if he works properly.The cost of labor is high,Only in few under developed states like bihar and orissa this cost is low .In other states the lower strata of society is having a much higher income growth than middle class nowadays.
Politicians ensure this because they won't come back to power if they don't ensure it.
Eventhough india doesn't tax agriculture vast majority of farmers are existential farmers with small land holding.The high cost of labor is making farming unattractive and loss prone.This is the biggest issue right now.With many farmers commiting suicide unable to pay their loans.