Nice article. One little correction at the end of your article. You write “thank goodness for ethylene” but I presume you mean Ethanol. Ethyle exists in the natural world and comes from ripe fruit. In the old days banana storages would blow up because of it. It can be made synthetically, serves as a base material for e.g. PVC production. Ethanol is hailed as the new alternative fuel but for a country like India, dealing with water and land shortages, growing sugarcane in quantities that would justify large scale production of Ethanol would be a misstake. Brazil does it as it has vast amounts of land (unfortunately a lot of that being converted rainforest) and water resources (in some areas)

India is changing. In the past everything wrong was, according to the officials, because of the colonial past. Since the early ’90’s that has changed and the country finally does the required sould searching why certain processes seem to take forever, why innefficiencies continue etc. Happy to read that you found the same attitude during your visits.

The beauty is that in India entrpreneurs have picked very good value added niches that do not require massive government investments and now have the government in the fold to join in creating the minimum infrastructure, putting research instritutes in place, spending on better (not more) education. Very different from the way China plays the economy.

The 2nd paragraph sort of ruins the story as it is not adding anything to what you are trying to tell about the China and India approach to FDI.

Don’t you think the two countries have plenty of opportunities to partner in R&D, manufacturing, IT and software, financial markets? If there would be a real EU type of economic co-operation in the future between these states there would be no limit to how far they can push (sustainable) development.