What the phoren press is saying about India's Economic prospects

Martin Wolf has written a brilliant piece in the FT:
India's elephant charges on through the economic crisis

Excerpts:

Before the crisis the country's gross savings rate had hit 36 per cent of GDP (see chart). Given the country's attractions to long-term foreign capital, that would allow an investment rate of close to 40 per cent of GDP. (Aha!)Such a high rate of investment could deliver 10 per cent growth. It might deliver even more: since India's output per head (at purchasing power parity) is roughly a fifteenth of that of the US, the potential for fast growth is huge.

Importantly:

I was struck by the upbeat tone of the essay on "macroeconomic performance and policies, 2000-8" by Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the Indian government. Dr Acharya is the most sober of competent analysts of the Indian economy. Indeed, the book gives a strong sense of the confidence of the technocratic elite in India's performance and prospects. Similar confidence is palpable among the business elite. This confidence makes this a radically different India from the one I knew when I was the senior divisional economist for India, at the World Bank, in the mid-1970s.

The emergence of an elite consensus on where the country is going is clear to any regular visitor.

Very Importantly:

Another feature is the belief that the pragmatism of India's policies, particularly over global finance and the balance of payments, had proved correct. Those in charge of a vast country with so many vulnerable people are rightly wary of making their economy hostage to the sociopathic tendencies of the financial sector.

Ordinarily, I would've said perhaps 'sociopathic' is too harsh a term. But having seen US fin sector shenanigans in the past 18 months, am no longer so sure.

Very gratifyingly, however comes this disarming admission that just blew me over:

Exhausted by the burden of its pretensions, the UK should soon offer its seat on the security council of the United Nations to its former colony. Its condition would be that France does the same in favour of the European Union. Whether or not such enlightened statesmanship is forthcoming (presumably not), we are moving into the age of continental superpowers. Asia will be home to not one, but two, of them.

Jai Ho Indeed.