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Preface
With the acceleration of India's GDP growth in recent years, especially after Indian-born Democrat Harris was elected vice president of the United States and Sunak became British prime minister, "India surpassing China" has been mentioned by the Indian media more and more as a topic of public opinion in recent years.
However, India lags behind China in most of the world's ranking issues, such as military, comprehensive national strength, economic structure, education level, infrastructure capacity, and currency status.
But as the saying goes, "the ruler is short, the inch is long", and many people believe that India has surpassed us in at least four aspects.
What's going on here? What do these four aspects refer to? Is that really the case?
Medical field
India has a number of strong healthcare programs, most notably its social security system, which provides free health care for all.
Many people wonder why India, with the world's largest population and a modest GDP, can achieve universal free health care that only a few countries have.
The simple reason is that universal health care in India was clearly stated in the first constitution adopted in 1949.
The constitution requires all Indians to be born with a no-payment medical system, including that doctors at all levels are not allowed to charge fees for consultations.
This is actually following the welfare rules of the British colonial church hospitals, which provided free medical diagnosis to the faithful and were copied after India's independence.
In India, the era of "population expansion" occurred after the establishment of universal health care, so in order to adapt to the population, each government had to spend a lot of time gradually improving this system, which constitutes the current universal free medical care system.
Is the health care system covering so many people chaotic? Not really.
Because although India is poor, the government is responsible for every link from the training of medical students at public expense, the construction of hospitals, the purchase of equipment to the manufacture of drugs, and the people attach great importance to the medical security system.
If the government of any state goes wrong with this, officials will be held accountable harshly, so many hospitals are rudimentary but not chaotic.
Especially in the field of drugs, India, which has no money to afford expensive foreign drugs, has also accumulated a generic drug system, and most of their generic drugs can be officially authorized abroad, and the efficacy of the drugs has also been recognized and exported by many countries.
In addition, the Indian government has made it clear that public hospitals are not allowed to make a profit in any way, while also providing the basis for patients to receive effective treatment and make it "affordable for the poorest".
So is free healthcare in India "anywhere is good"? Of course not.
Because the population is expanding so fast, public free medical funds cannot keep up, and the Indian government can only continue to reduce the level of medical care, the number of beds and equipment, resulting in hospitals in many states in India not even having a few professional machines and doctors.
Therefore, in recent years, paying private hospitals in India have also proliferated, and more and more people would rather pay some money to receive better medical conditions than queue up to enjoy "free medical care", and at the same time, Indians also understand that they can enjoy better medical services by spending money.
Software field
Many people may have heard that India's IT industry and software outsourcing industry are strong, but they don't know how strong they are.
According to NASSCOM, 55% of the value of global software and service exports in 2019 was occupied by India alone, and 30% of the world's software developed by software development zones in India has been accounted for.
In terms of software outsourcing, India has captured 65% of the global market share, and almost every region in the country has software industrial parks.
The Indian media once described that even uneducated Indians can engage in assembly and some simple CNC work, and they are the country that really "sends software to the countryside".
From the era of transistors to the current era of silicon chips, wherever there are computers, there are shadows of Indians participating.
The Indian software is strong because they are "seizing the opportunity" too early.
In the 80s and 90s of the last century, when the Internet was still only a concept, the Indian government decided that the industry had a lot to offer, so it vigorously allocated funds and invested in the establishment of a set of university systems and business model concepts, and promoted the concept of the Internet from primary school.
The Indian government's "bet" is not wrong, in the 90s, when the Internet rose, India's domestic IT system has been generally established.
And the decisive thing is the advantage of cheap manpower in India, which has received a large number of orders since the beginning of the last century.
At that time, the labor cost in developed countries was already very expensive, and more and more countries outsourced it to India, because India was one of the very few countries with low labor costs and "understanding" IT, and it was difficult for these two concepts to exist in a certain country.
Since then, it is not difficult to understand that India's IT has gradually become bigger and stronger.
Therefore, the government's attention, coupled with the education system and industrial production lines that have been accumulated, have made the Indian IT industry a decisive leader.
And the Indian government is also "doing its best" to maintain this advantageous position, and still invests a lot of money every year.
So is India's IT sector stronger than China's? Of course not.
In the era of IT-based artificial intelligence transformation, India has fallen behind due to a series of problems such as tight funds, insufficient advantages in scientific research projects and independent property rights, and China has completed a comprehensive overtake of India in this field.
In the decisive 10 years from 2014 to 2023, China spent dozens of times more money than India to establish its position as the No. 1 in Asia.
India's domestic AI development has been slow in previous years, but Modi has paid attention to the key role of AI in the future in recent years.
It was not until March 2024 that the Indian government approved the national-level "IndiaAI Mission" project, which aims to achieve the twin goals of "making AI take root in India" and "making AI work for India".
However, judging from the existing results, it seems that it is difficult for them to catch up with countries such as China and the United States, and the Indian AI industry can only "accept fate".
Demographic dividend
Russia's Vishnevsky Institute of Demography has published a report on contemporary global population growth and demise.
The conclusion is that among all countries in the world, the two countries that can enjoy the "demographic dividend" to the greatest extent are India and Indonesia, and India has surpassed China in the field of demographic dividend.
Although there are many populous countries in the world, the term "dividend" can not be applied to a wide extent.
In fact, countries such as Japan and South Korea have entered the era of population aging, and China is also approaching the threshold of aging.
The high labor force structure will create lower value, and the excessive aging population will greatly increase the cost of raising the young population and society, which cannot be counted in the demographic dividend.
The current birth rate in our country has dropped significantly, and the birth rate in India is still stable.
According to the population pyramid, the mainland will be able to maintain a high-quality labor force between the ages of 30 and 40 in 2020.
However, due to the "hollowing out of the lower class" caused by the low birth rate, by 2030, China's labor force will have reached the "old age" dominated by 40 to 50 years old, and the proportion of elderly people over 60 years old is very high.
And India's population pyramid in 2021 is "spades".
Although India's birth rate has also decreased, the main domestic labor force structure is 20 to 30 years old, and the proportion of "potential labor force" between 10 and 20 years old is higher than that of 20 to 30 year olds;
This means that in the next 30 years, India will have a large population of young and middle-aged people, and the social pressure of the elderly will also be low.
Compared with Indonesia, which has a population of nearly 300 million people, India also has a big "dividend advantage", and Hinduism is not serious in terms of "shackling female labor".
Although the status of women in India is low, crimes against women in India are also high and they have access to fewer industries, which is a common problem.
However, religion in India does not require women to tie up their families or restrict them from engaging in various basic jobs, but many states encourage and support rural women to "enter the factory".
Indonesia, on the other hand, has a significantly lower proportion of female labor force than India due to religious reasons, so India's labor force can create more value in this field.
However, India's demographic dividend is not comprehensively leading compared with China.
At this stage, India's education rate lags behind China in all aspects, for example, their tertiary enrolment rate is only 32%, which is a big difference from China's 72%.
Another reason is that the country's economic problems, most Indians receive a relatively low-quality education model, and the government does not have so much money to build schools and hire teachers, so the working population that comes out of school is of low quality and has few vocational skills.
In addition, India's current labor force in the same age group creates only 37% of the value of China's and about 16% of that of the United States.
This has also largely contributed to the loss of Indian migration in recent years, with many people going overseas to earn a living or even smuggling to other countries.
India's high-level brain drain rate is one of the highest in Asia, forcing the government to introduce a series of subsidies to retain these groups.
Indian film and television industry
Many people have heard of Indian Bollywood and watched several Indian movies and TV series, but they are not clear about the size of the country's film and television industry.
In fact, the Indian film and television industry is not only leading and widely spread in Asia, but the Indian Bollywood film industry is also one of the largest film industries in the world.
His films have had a profound impact on the world, and they have also created a lot of value wealth for them in China, and have received high box office prices in other countries around the world.
Like the IT industry mentioned above, Indian cinema has its origins very early.
In 1903, during the British colonial rule, India had already released its first film "Raja Harsha", which was the first country in Asia to be involved in the film and television industry.
In the first 50 years of the 20th century, countries around the world were very unstable because of the war environment, and India was relatively stable, giving the film and television industry plenty of room for development.
The Bollywood film industry began to emerge in the 20s, when young filmmakers began to experiment with the combination of traditional Indian art, music and dance to create an "ethnic" style of Indian cinema.
Bollywood has gradually developed from silent films to color sound films, keeping pace with countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, and creating a very diverse range of themes, which has smoothly pushed the film to the grassroots.
The early boom in Indian cinema has paved the way for the present, with the gradual use of English instead of Hindi in their main "borderless" industrial chain, which is a crucial step in bringing it to the international market.
From the 40s to the 60s of the 20th century, known as the golden age of the Indian Bollywood film industry, Indian productions had been sold to Western countries at that time, and some classic films such as "Shakti" and "Mother India" were very highly praised.
The mainland's modern commercial films started as late as the 80s of the last century, and it was only after the reform and opening up that a large-scale film and television industry gradually emerged.
But again, India's film and television industry is not "all-round leading" for the mainland.
Indian TV presenters once commented: Chinese films are maintaining a higher and higher level of "local commercialization", although India's overseas box office is low, but the harvest of many films in China is enough to be worth the global box office of Indian films.
Indians have a low consumption power for their own films, and only a few of them sell in India every year, so directors are increasingly inclined to make "Westernized" films.
In addition, in the past 100 years of Indian cinema, there is a shackle that has never been broken, and most of the films they shoot have a clear and strong Indian ethnic style, which is difficult to be recognized by conservative different ethnic groups in the world.
Although China's film and television industry has developed for a short time, since 2016, China's film and TV series consumers have rapidly spread to Southeast Asian neighboring countries, and now many films and television have been "shared" by neighboring countries.
India has discussed this issue, arguing that China's bold use of non-Chinese actors and its pan-Asian route is indeed very high in this field.
epilogue
Generally speaking, comparing China and India, we have indeed surpassed India in many areas at this stage, but we must have a "healthy" view on this issue.
India and China, as two countries with close geographical proximity, need to fully understand each other's national conditions, so that we can "know ourselves and know each other, and we will not be defeated in a hundred battles".
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Resources:
"Bollywood Movies Help Modi Visit China, India Shows Soft Power to the East" Global Network
"By this time, Indians have finally told the truth about free medical care in India" Global Network
"Increasing 10 million laborers a year, the employment dilemma is difficult to solve - is India's population a "dividend" or a "bomb"? 》Globe.com