India’s rise is one of the most comforting myths of the modern age. A billion-plus people, young population, civilizational backstory older than most maps. The story sells itself. Destiny, demographics, and divinity all pointing in the same direction. None of those things build a superpower.
Start with the youth boom. By 2030, India is expected to have roughly 600 million more people under the age of 25 than it did a decade ago. Sheer numbers, we're told, automatically compound into strength. They don’t. A large young population is only an asset if it is educated, skilled, healthy, and productively employed. Otherwise, it’s just mass.
India’s youth bulge is real. So is the arithmetic it refuses to confront. Each year, tens of millions age into the workforce, but the economy creates only a fraction of the jobs required to employ them meaningfully. This isn’t a temporary mismatch. It’s structural. Too many leave school unable to read fluently, write clearly, or perform basic quantitative tasks. More than a quarter of the population remains illiterate. The modern economy absorbs a narrow elite and discards the rest.
What should function as an engine becomes a pressure cooker. Underemployment spreads. Informal work swells. Wages stagnate. Frustration accumulates quietly, then politically. The celebrated “demographic dividend” begins to look less like capital and more like liability. Energy’s abundant, but direction is absent. Ambition multiplies faster than opportunity. A population surge without productivity doesn’t propel a nation forward. It weighs it down—slowly, relentlessly, and without mercy.
This feeds into the next failure: manufacturing. China became a rival to the United States not because it was uniquely gifted or visionary, but because it was relentless. It built ports, power plants, roads, and factories at brutal speed. It trained workers, disciplined capital, and accepted short-term pain for long-term leverage. India talks endlessly about manufacturing. It launches initiatives, slogans, and investor summits heavy on promise and light on delivery. Then reality sets in. Foreign firms arrive, study the terrain, and quickly scale back or leave.
Permits multiply. Land acquisition drags on for years. Labor laws remain rigid, opaque, and adversarial. India inundates investors with permits, land disputes, and labor regulations. Factories cannot scale in a country where every expansion becomes a negotiation and every negotiation becomes a lawsuit. Courts move at a glacial pace, turning routine disputes into decade-long ordeals. Capital hates uncertainty, and India specializes in it.
It also specializes in corruption. Every country has it, but India has refined it into a daily ritual. I’ve spent considerable time there. My fiancée is from neighboring Nepal; her grandfather’s family comes from northern India. I’ve heard the stories and watched the choreography up close. Clerical workers with palms permanently open. Police officers treating the law like a menu with prices. Academics bribed to pass, promote, or publish. Nothing moves without a lubricant.
This isn’t rogue behavior at the margins. It’s systemic. When corruption becomes routine, trust collapses. Contracts mean less. Rules blur. A superpower cannot function on favors and envelopes. Power requires institutions that work without persuasion. India still persuades everything, and that alone disqualifies it.
Infrastructure reveals what growth charts obscure. Outside a handful of modern airports and business districts, the system’s a shambles. Buses are overcrowded, unsafe, and unreliable. Public transport limps where it exists at all. Roads buckle, flood, and choke daily. Power cuts are routine. Freight moves slowly and expensively, bleeding time and money at every junction. Trucks stall at state borders, stopped by paperwork, payoffs, or sheer dysfunction. A superpower moves people and goods with speed and certainty. India moves them eventually.
Culturally, India isn’t plural so much as partitioned. Language, caste, religion, and region compete rather than coexist. Loyalty flows downward—to family, caste, state, sect—long before it flows upward to the nation. This tribal structure is ancient and politically volatile. Diversity is praised in speeches, but power requires coordination, and coordination falters when every decision is filtered through identity arithmetic. China crushes difference to enforce unity. America, although divided, is still largely united by a common civic framework and national story. India vacillates between the two and masters neither. It governs by bargaining between blocs, containing rivalries rather than transcending them. Energy that could project strength outward is spent keeping the center from cracking.
Technology offers another illusion. India produces excellent engineers, but in narrow bands. Its tech sector shines in services, not platforms. It supports other nations’ systems rather than building its own dominant ones. The country exports talent because it can’t fully use it at home. Silicon Valley benefits. India loses leverage. A superpower keeps its best minds building domestic power, not foreign balance sheets.
None of this means India will fail. It’ll grow. It’ll matter and be important. But importance is not dominance. Scale isn’t strength. Youth isn’t power. Growth rates don’t equal gravity. Power’s the ability to shape outcomes beyond your borders. On that measure, India’s rise remains statistical—impressive on paper, constrained in reality.