India the Superpower: Extraordinary or usual?

India and China’s GDP is growing at rate of more than 10%. Both nations are estimated to be superpowers in the twenty first century. Is this change to India which was always perceived to be a country of poor’s, underdeveloped an extraordinary or an usual.



Historically in the seventeenth century India was always referred as ‘Sone Ki Chidiya’ (Country of Gold). Things started changing as the western colonist expanded their trade empire from 1800 till 1947. In that era India was much advanced and richer in culture and economy than even Constantinople and the European superpowers. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world's GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1%, while India had been reduced for the first time to the epitome of a Third World nation, a symbol across the globe of famine, poverty and deprivation ( reference:- Time- Thursday, Aug. 02, 2007).
Today, India has more software engineers than any other country. The manufacturing, retails, software and for that matter each and every segment is growing at an overwhelming rate. Is this change extraordinary or just of the blue? My Answer: Nope. It just follows the law of equilibrium.

It was Indian subcontinent in the seventeenth century followed by the rise of America and Russia after the worlds wars and now it’s again the Asian subcontinent. The world trade has followed a sinusoidal wave. It increases, reaches maximum, break evens, reduces and then increases again. The history has seen this sinusoidal behavior with the rise and fall of great empires, nation and cultures and this trend also continues in today’s’ information technology age. The interesting parameter is ‘Time’ which is on X axis. This has varied and will continue to vary depending upon the initial conditions, inequality, intrinsic and external factors relating to a nation, momentum or rate of change etc… It is estimated that China and India will surpass the USA GDP by 2030 and 2045 respectively.
Thus the rise of India and China is not that big surprise. With more than 2 billion skilled workers among the two nations it is just a matter of time that these two humongous pieces of land will start dominating the world economy.