Thread: India to overtake China in 2020: Swaminathan Aiyar

India will overtake China as the fastest-growing economy in the world. China will start ageing and suffering from a declining workforce, and will be forced to revalue its currency. So its growth will decelerate, just as Japan decelerated in the 1990s after looking unstoppable in the 1980s. Having become the world's second-biggest economy, China's export-oriented model will erode sharply - the world will no longer be able to absorb its exports at the earlier pace. Meanwhile, India will gain demographically with a growing workforce that is more literate than ever before. The poorer Indian states will start catching up with the richer ones. This will take India's GDP growth to 10% by 2020, while China's growth will dip to 7-8%.



India will become the largest English-speaking nation in the world, overtaking the US. So, the global publishing industry will shift in a big way to India. Rupert Murdoch's heirs will sell his collapsing media empire to Indian buyers. The New York Times will become a subsidiary of an Indian publishing giant.



In the 2000s, India finally gained entry into the nuclear club, and sanctions against it were lifted. By 2020, Indian companies will be major exporters of nuclear equipment, a vital link in the global supply chain. So, India will be in a position to impose nuclear sanctions on others.



India, along with the US and Canada, will develop new technology to extract natural gas from gas hydrates - a solidified form of gas lying on ocean floors. India has the largest gas hydrate deposits in the world, and so will become the biggest global producer. This will enable India to substitute gas for coal in power generation, hugely reducing carbon emissions and making Jairam Ramesh look saintly.



India will also discover enormous deposits of shale gas in its vast shale formations running through the Gangetic plain, Assam, Rajasthan and Gujarat. New technology has made the extraction of shale gas economic, so India will become a major gas producer and exporter. Meanwhile, Iran's mullahs will be overthrown, and a new democratic regime will usher in rapid economic growth that creates a shortage of gas in Iran by 2020. So, the Iran-India pipeline will be recast, but in reverse form: India will now export gas to Iran.



More and more regions of India will demand separate statehood. By 2020, India will have 50 states instead of the current 28. The new states will not exactly be small. With 50 states and a population of almost 1.5 billion, India will average 30 million people per state, far higher than the current US average of 6 million per state.



China, alarmed at India's rise, will raise tensions along the Himalayan border. China will threaten to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra from Tibet to water-scarce northern China. India will threaten to bomb any such project. The issue will go to the Security Council.



Islamic fundamentalists will take over in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US will withdraw from the region, leaving India to bear the brunt of consequences. Terrorism will rise in India, but the economy will still keep growing. How so? Well, 3000 people die every year falling off Mumbai's suburban trains, and that does not stop Mumbai's growth. Terrorism will bruise India, but not halt its growth.







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Whoever can outfuck/outbreed to bring in the most slave laborers will be the winners?



Is this the future?

I think you missed the theme there Zara... it says a highly literate, highly educated, democratic, multi-lingual, wealthy, resource rich India that values education and science above all else will win.



The uneducated, &#39;God hates book learnin and Fags&#39;, &#39;I aint doing business with no brownie&#39;, &#39;If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it ought to be good enough for us&#39; will lose.





The article is pretty damn presumptuous. It lists all the past &#39;flavous of the decade&#39; and tells that they are all now coming back down to Earth... but doesn&#39;t make the same connection that the same will happen to the next new &#39;thang&#39; that comes along.



The fact of the matter is when a developing country becomes a developed one it makes such massive economic and socail leaps that it looks like it wont stop - but it always stops and levels off with the rest of the developed world. Happened to Japan, then the Asian Tigers that followed (Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), now it&#39;s happening to China, next will be Eastern Europre and India, and I hope after that will be Russia (20 years without a horrific mass murdering self-destruction, they are well overdue). I&#39;d like to think I&#39;ll live to see the day Africa gets its turn.

I feel bad for laughing at that. But I laughed at that.

And overpopulation comes from under-education.



The root of all evil.

There&#39;s an old Mountie saying, "When you see hoofprints - think horse, not zebra"



Which essentially means statistical correlations don&#39;t mean logical conclusions... but they still might mean generally reliable statistical correlations.



What separates the family in Rwanda having 5 kids in hopes one survives to adulthood from the family in Zurich or Tokyo or Boston having one child only and safely assuming it will almost definately survive to adulthood? You could say famine, untreated disease, war, crime, dangerous working conditions, lack of social safety net... but all of these are (to me) ultimately symptoms of either a lack of education, or genuine mental illness.



And why does mental illness go so often untreated????



Lack of education.