India's superpower narrative outpaces capability under Modi — SkimNews
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- India's GDP gap with China widened from 3.6x in 2010 to 4.9x in 2025, with China's economy at $19.5 trillion versus India's $4 trillion, while per-capita GDP gap widened from 3.3x to 5.1x
- India's AI patent share stood at roughly 0.40% of granted patents in 2024, while China accounted for about 74.2%, with the article attributing the disparity to India's failure to retain technical talent at home
- The Lowy Institute's 2025 Asia Power Index ranks India third in comprehensive power in Asia but records its largest "Power Gap" in the index's history, meaning actual regional influence trails potential resources
- Moonshot AI, co-founded by Yang Zhilin after he returned to China from Google Brain and Meta, has a Kimi K3 model that now rivals top US systems — Bloomberg Intelligence cites a 3% performance gap between leading US and Chinese models
- India's diaspora received approximately $150.7 billion in remittances in 2025 (the highest globally) as the US tightened H-1B rules and suspended IT employers from the PERM labor certification program
- Indian-origin CEOs Sundar Pichai (Google) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) built their careers inside American institutions, a contrast the article uses to argue India exports rather than retains and mobilizes tech talent
Why it matters: India's diaspora-driven narrative obscures a widening capability gap — China's GDP is now 4.9x India's, China holds 74.2% of AI patents versus India's 0.4%, and tech talent trained in India builds careers at US firms like Google and Microsoft rather than launching homegrown champions. For Indian policymakers, the cost is measured in structural dependency on foreign institutions, not in the volume of summit slogans.
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