PoliticsThe Rise of India in a Changing World
India it is now unquestionably the world's innovation hub, says the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, holding that India is a near-future superpower. The Bush Administration, too, was clear about its wish to help India into superpower status during the twenty-first century; and the Obama Administration seems set to continue to policy, hosting Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, as the first guest of an official State Dinner. Indeed, the numbers point in the same direction: the GDP of the Indian economy, Goldman Sachs analyses detail, will surpass that of the United States before middle of the century. So how did all of this happen -- and so fast? How has India risen from a class-riddled, colonized, overcrowded nation to become one of the rising stars of the global economy? "India's ambitions have been always been immodest," says Sunil Khilnani, the Academy's inaugural Metro Fellow and Director of the South Asia Studies program at the Johns Hopkins University.
