It's hard to compare India to any other country except for China. No other nation is of a comparable size. It's all well and good to say "well Japan, South Korea, Singapore did great after being devastated by war and depression and famine". Just like software, scale matters for national development.
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.