Can India Change the world?

Is India the world’s next tiger economy, poised to succeed a slowing China as a pillar of the global economy?

That wouldn’t be anything new, simply a recovery of its traditional position.

One economic historian estimates that as recently as 1700, India accounted for about 24 per cent of global GDP, similar to the share now of the United States or Europe. But today India makes up just 3 per cent of global GDP, up from 1 per cent in 1993.

As India overtakes China as the most populous country in the world, and as international companies seek new bases for manufacturing outside China, India has a historic opportunity to recover its mojo in a way that would change the world.

But can this lumbering giant of a nation actually pull that off?

Some experts are optimistic. “I fully believe this can be not just India’s decade, but also India’s century,” Bob Sternfels, the global managing partner of McKinsey & Co, told me — from Mumbai, which he was visiting.

And Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, says that India is on track “for unprecedented economic growth” that will allow it to leapfrog Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-biggest economy by 2027.

I’m not quite that confident in India’s future, but I do believe it has a fighting chance to soar economically — if it faces up to three major challenges: It needs to improve education, boost women in the labour force and improve the business climate to increase manufacturing.

Let’s start with education, which should be an Indian national embarrassment. In Kolkata, a city renowned for its intellectual tradition, I dropped in on a government school and chatted with some ninth graders.

What is 6 times 9, I asked them. They didn’t understand in English, which is part of the curriculum, so a teacher translated the question into Bengali, their native language. The students still didn’t know. That’s not their fault, but that of an educational system that leaves too many behind.

In rural Rajasthan, I visited an impoverished village and came across a handful of children who simply hadn’t attended school that day. Absenteeism is a national problem, and the school later told me that attendance that day was just 68 per cent .

National surveys confirm that even when Indian children go to school, they don’t necessarily learn much. Fewer than half of fifth graders can read a text at a second-grade level.

China has thrived in part because it made enormous investments in human capital — transforming what in the early 1980s had been a broken education system — and that created a literate, numerate workforce. In contrast, India isn’t even in the ballpark. Figures vary, but perhaps only 35 per cent of Indian children make it to grades 11 and 12.

But wait! Maybe there’s hope. In the 41 years that I’ve been visiting India, I’ve seen tremendous improvements in education and well-being. Teacher absenteeism used to be routine, and in Bihar state I once came across a school that opened only once a year, for exams, which teachers then filled out so that it would look as if students were learning.

All that is much rarer today, and the authorities in some states have eliminated book fees, uniform fees and other informal charges that were a barrier to school attendance. Free hot lunches and deworming are now routine, and it’s rare to find young children who are completely outside the school system.

In Rajasthan on this trip, I visited a school that had only two classrooms for eight grades, so some of its classes were conducted outside. But the teachers were qualified, present and engaged. I was impressed that the school had a free pre-K attached to it, open to all — and, most startling, the school provides free sanitary pads to girls to encourage them to attend school during their periods.

Moreover, parents these days seem to care deeply about education. Perhaps one-half of Indian children attend private schools — a huge strain on family budgets — because parents want their kids to get the best education possible, including schooling in English. These private schools reflect families’ recognition that education is the path to success.

Naurti Bai, a 77-year-old woman in Rajasthan, never went to school as a child, although later she went to night school and learned to read and write.

She proudly told me that she has 13 grandchildren, all of whom have finished high school; four have university degrees. One granddaughter even has a master’s degree, she added — and it’s that kind of trajectory that gives me hope for Indian education.

Beyond improving education, India also has to offer opportunities for educated women in the economy.

The East Asian economic boom rested on very different economic models. South Korea’s path looked nothing like Taiwan’s, and China’s was different from Malaysia’s. But one common thread was that these countries prospered in part by educating village girls and then moving these educated women into the urban labour force, hugely expanding their country’s productivity. Bangladesh has done something similar.

India in contrast squanders the talent of the female half of its population, at least in economic terms. Only 23 per cent of Indian women are in the labour force — compared with 61 per cent in China and 56 per cent in the United States — and in India female labour force participation has actually been dropping for most of the past two decades.

While health and education obstacles affect all children, they are often particularly acute for girls because of age-old discriminatory attitudes.

“Many girls are still underfed, malnourished, and suffer from stunting and anaemia,” noted Ruchira Gupta, founder of an anti-trafficking organisation called Apne Aap. “They don’t have access to secondary schools, and young women don’t have enough access to universities, training programmes and most of all, to jobs in the formal sector.”

Nicholas Kristof

The writer is a NY Times columnist, author, farmer