Last Tuesday, on the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn India into a developed country within the next 25 years. If all goes well, that could actually come to pass, but it would have to go very well indeed.
The demographic and economic signs are positive. The country's population has grown fourfold since independence in 1947, but population growth has now dropped to "replacement level": 2.1 children per completed family.
The current youngest generation is so large that the population will keep growing until 2060, when it will have reached 1.7 billion. The upside of this is that India will continue to have a rapidly growing young workforce for another generation, while its only rival, China, will have a rapidly ageing and dwindling population (1.2 billion and still falling in 2060).
