The ascent of India’s economy

INDIA HAS seldom been a source of economic cheer. The “Hindu rate of growth” is, notoriously, a pace so stubbornly slow it might have been cosmically fixed. Even in recent decades, as India has become the world’s fastest-growing big economy and closes in on being its fourth-largest, it has never matched the pace of Asia’s 20th-century tigers. The goal set by Narendra Modi, the prime minister, of being a developed economy by 2047, the centennial of independence, has seemed far off. The world’s most populous country has remained peripheral to the global economy. But it is now showing remarkable promise.