While India does have issues like bureaucracy which have slowed its rise, from what I have learned about China over the past year, China isn't doing much better than India in terms of actually lifting its people out of poverty. The differences are in perception more than in reality, and the CCP government is a master of controlling outsider perception through the use of controlled state run media, made up statistics, and censorship; the outsiders aren't allowed to see the problem areas, and forget about seeing the truth about slave labor and organ harvesting using millions of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, Falun Gong followers and common Chinese people imprisoned unjustly. At least 600 million Chinese (and probably more due to CCP censorship and fudged numbers) are below the poverty line based on UN poverty standards, but CCP simply changed the definition of where the poverty line is, in order to change the numbers.We have pulled millions out of poverty too. The question remains do we do it at the speed and scale at which China has done - that is borrow enormous amounts of money and build excess, wasteful capacity. Think about a scenario like this:
- build a city called new Varanasi that is ultra modern with zero people living there in the hopes that 10-20 years down the line this city will be populated. This will increase our GDP by tens of billions of dollars. Is this model ever going to work in India, in reality? We are struggling to get 1 high speed rail line from Mumbai to Delhi going, as everything from profitability to environmental issues are being looked at sharply.
Outsiders unfamiliar with the dark underbelly of China rely on the propaganda put out by the state machinery and look at China's shiny cities, not realizing the massive gap in wealth which exists between the wealthy CCP members in the big cities (who make up 6 percent of the population) and the common Chinese people.
Meanwhile you have Indian media constantly magnifying every weakness of the Indian economy and system, so it seems much bleaker.
China is not so great in reality when you find out about its darker side, and India is not as bad as Indian media shows it out to be. It's just another case of the grass being greener on the other side, without realizing that the other side is doing horrible things to its people while hiding the reality; and CCP media just showing off the wealth of a small part of the population in big cities, while the Chinese masses are still living off rats, literally.