In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
That’s great, but does not translate well to ..say.. manufacturing modern chips or jet engines.
US patents are only valid in the US. India is not "ignoring" anything by not following foreign laws. Can someone with an Indian patent enforce it in the US?
"A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."
So, actually, No.
Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.
Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.
Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).
Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.
I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.
How many people do you think could conceivably work in manufacturing? And who buys all those manufactured goods? The social problem isn’t solved by quotas.
India's data collection is much worse than China's but we can also look at other metrics like exports. India exports less in total value than a resource-starved, tiny nation like South Korea.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/3aba98a3-cba1-49d8-bcb4-869...
Thus, India could at least add another 100 million manufacturing jobs, along with an additional 100 million service jobs to support manufacturing in logistics, trade, maintenance, customer support, insurance, and food service.
Given the structure of Indian constitution which gives very little power to local governments to raise revenue and build infrastructure, India is structurally limited as of now from ever becoming as developed as China, let alone western countries.
I see India becoming more like Brazil than China. That's not necessarily a bad thing since even Brazil is 4-5x richer in per capita than India.