In his career as a journalist and one of India’s top entrepreneurs, Raghav Bahl has often faced a barrage of questions from visiting businesspeople bewildered by India: Why are Indian regulations so weak and confusing? Why is your foreign investment policy so restrictive? How is it that you speak such good English? Inevitably, the questions are followed by the observation: But, you know, that’s not the way it is in China.

Indeed, even as the two economies are together projected to dominate the world, there is a palpable difference in the way China and India work on the ground. China is spectacularly effective in building infrastructure and is currently investing almost half its GDP. Meanwhile, India is a ‘promising’ economy: more than half its GDP is consumed by its billionplus population; half its population is younger than twenty-five, giving it a unique demographic advantage; 350 million Indians understand English, making it the largest English-using country in the world

In the race to superpower status, who is likely to breast the tape—China’s hare or India’s tortoise? For anyone looking to understand China and India and the ways in which these two nations are about to change the history of the world, this is the book to read.