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There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
Rare is the day I don't get tagged in a post that references India indeed.
That being said, I broadly agree with you, the prospects of fully decoupling from China are daunting, but I wouldn't say that it's an effort guaranteed to not pay some dividends.
Quantity has a quality all of its own, even if 50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate, that leaves maybe anywhere around a hundred million more who are.
Now, I'm personally bearish on the country's midterm prospects, and while I can't claim to be able to entirely decouple my opinion of the country from my hatred of Modi and his ilk, I see great risk of the country imploding under pressure, likely from automation induced unemployment shocks that potentially stoke sectarian strife; which is why I'm departing post-haste.
As long as you have a massive pool, you can still dredge out a great number of qualified candidates, and even outstanding ones.
When I became familiar with HBD, I had to grapple with the fact that my previous implicit assumption that India was high up in the totem pole when it came to the quality of its people was skewed because the large number of successful Indians dominating foreign lands are a heavily filtered set, and not representative of how Indians in India perform.
After all, isn't the best counter-argument to claims that HBD is motivated reasoning and just a way to dunk on your outgroup to outright admit that the ethnicity you belong to isn't the best per capita?
The HBD framework suggests that India will never achieve the same kind of growth and success as East Asian nations, at least not without something fundamental changing. That's not to say that it's not an important player, just that the numbers are bloated, but not to the degree that they don't convey some advantage.
I'm not going to speculate on how well we can onshore manufacturing, because I consider myself insufficiently informed on the matter. But it looks to me that an India that successfully achieves even 30% of China's manufacturing clout would be a major buffer against blackmail through their manufacturing dominance, and even with my jaundiced view of the country I suspect it can achieve that.
You'd think so, but I've seen leftists make the argument "White supremacists' willingness to rate the intelligence of Asians higher than that of whites is just because they hate blacks so much that they're willing to do anything to insult their intelligence."
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