Where's India's Economic Miracle?

As the economy has continued to slow since 2010, the mood has grown steadily more pessimistic. India’s growth rate has now sunk from 9.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2010 to about 5 per cent a year, slipping from the world’s second-fastest-growing economy to tenth place in this index. Other economic indicators are equally alarming: public borrowing has quadrupled in the past five years, the national deficit is growing, inflation is high and the value of the rupee has plummeted by 20 per cent in the course of the summer. In a few years, India has gone from what seemed to be imminent world economic domination – the maharaja of the Brics – to what the emerging market analyst Ruchir Sharma, the author of last year’s bestseller Breakout Nations, has called merely a “50-50 bet”.