India to overtake China in 2020?

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 08 January 2010, 22:06 IST   |    20 Comments
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India to overtake China in 2020?
Bangalore: The world has been seeing India and China as the future economic superpowers and it is expected that India may overtake China in the year 2020 as the fastest growing economy in the world. Renowned mediaperson Swaminathan Aiyar writes in Economic Times that having become the world's second-biggest economy, China's export-oriented model will erode sharply and the world will no longer be able to absorb its exports at the earlier pace. According to Aiyar, 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. 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 percent by 2020, while China's growth will dip to 7-8 percent, Aiyar adds. He believes that by 2020 India will become the largest English-speaking nation in the world, overtaking even the U.S. Aiyar writes that 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 and the issue will go to the UN Security Council. He feels that terrorism will rise in India, but the economy will still keep growing because of the citizens' confidence.