Management guru Peter Drucker has said India is becoming an economic powerhouse very fast and its progress is far more impressive than that of China.
In an interview to Fortune magazine, he said, "India is becoming a powerhouse very fast. The medical school in New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And the technical graduates of the Institute of Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world."
Also, India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is indeed becoming a knowledge centre, the 94-year-old management thinker said.
In contrast, he said, the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people. China has only 1.5 million college students, out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. If they had the American proportion, they would have 12 million or more in college.
In China, there is enormous undeveloped hinterland with excess rural population, but the likelihood of the absorption of rural workers into the cities without upheaval seems very dubious, he said.
"You don't have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities. India's rural population has gone from 90 per cent to 54 per cent without any upheaval," he said.
Everybody says China has 8 per cent growth and India only 3 per cent, but that is a total misconception. "I think India's progress is far more impressive than China's," he said.
