The competitive advantage in India in the long term is that their population will be significantly younger than China.
> India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
In the other hand India is confronting other problems.
Sen wrote the book "Development as Freedom" after winning the 1998 Economics Nobel prize. He's known for the general observation that famines occur seldom in democratic societies because politicians are at a gross level accountable for outrageous mismanagement of resource allocation.
India got independence only in 1947. All growth till then made the British richer. Till the 1990s india had a strange cross breed b/w socialism and capitalism where large govt factories and govt organization employed most people and had low productivity.
One major gain was a strong focus on education many of them learning English. However most of it is rote learning centric. It is only in recent years that India has been able to make a place for itself in the BRIC economies.
> India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
In the other hand India is confronting other problems.