What India wants India will get. As Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh told me a couple of years ago, India wants to overtake China while putting its own runaway capitalism under tighter social control. At the time, he seemed downbeat about realising these goals. But, as India emerges faster than China from the great recession, and as its huge anti-poverty programmes begin to bite, his pessimism seems unwarranted.
I first went to Calcutta 35 years ago. It was then literally a 'black hole'. I walked out of my hotel in the evening. Everywhere was dark. The city could only afford minimal street lighting. The bodies of families eating, defecating and sleeping were scattered along every pavement.
I returned 30 years later. After nearly 30 years of communist rule, it was a transformed city. The shanty towns had gone and the poor had flats with sewerage and clean water. The families on the pavement had all but disappeared although single men sleep here and there. The city is brightly lit, the streets are cleaned every day and the police is efficient.
No longer do poor peasants pour into the city. The great land reform in the West Bengal countryside has given every peasant a living on their own soil. Of the states, West Bengal has the second most productive agriculture in India. No wonder Dr Singh told me he wants the rest of India to emulate West Bengal.
Investment, foreign and domestic, is pouring into the state. Educational levels and health services have been dramatically improved. West Bengal has produced seven Nobel prize winners and a disproportionate number of the world's top economists.
India is well on its way to overtake China, but with a type of development more coherent that China's winner-take-all capitalism. As one banker put it to me: 'China was ahead because it had no rule of law. But now India will go ahead because it has rule of law.'