Democracy might not be efficient but it is the best safeguard we have against severe abuses. Look at China they might have benefited from their autocracy in recent years, but they paid dearly for it during the cultural revolution. India has been spared horrors like that exactly because they have been a democracy.
Other than that I think the countries are too different to make any hard conclusions. China has very strong traditions for effective administration going thousands of years back. This has likely been of more profound importance than dictatorship. Japan after the war managed to grow very rapidly under democracy. So did Germany.
While economic development in India has always been difficult. Even during the British dictatorship in India they had problems getting any kind of modern business going.
I think India suffers from not really being a single country and from being dam hot. It is harder to get stuff done under such heat. Productivity will pick up there when aircondition becomes far more common.
Really I think India should be multiple countries. When you put together lots of countries which are too different, you will get too many conflicts which will make progress grind to a halt.
India was about as poor as countries like South Korea immediately post world war 2. The most massive difference was their embrace of a Soviet style planned economy, which means that they grew at about 1-2% annually for the next 40 years and South Korea grew at a much, much higher rate. It's not a coincidence that economic liberalization in India in the early 90s (as with china, 15 years earlier) coincided with a boom in growth rate.
I fully agree with your point that India ideally should be many, many countries: democracy suffers greatly when a massive, linguistically, religiously, and culturally diverse subcontinent is forced into a single government. Just look at Europe and their cautious, precarious tiptoeing towards political unity, despite having the relative advantage of being infinitely less diverse, way less religious, and way more developed than the Indian subcontinent.
Other than that I think the countries are too different to make any hard conclusions. China has very strong traditions for effective administration going thousands of years back. This has likely been of more profound importance than dictatorship. Japan after the war managed to grow very rapidly under democracy. So did Germany.
While economic development in India has always been difficult. Even during the British dictatorship in India they had problems getting any kind of modern business going.
I think India suffers from not really being a single country and from being dam hot. It is harder to get stuff done under such heat. Productivity will pick up there when aircondition becomes far more common.
Really I think India should be multiple countries. When you put together lots of countries which are too different, you will get too many conflicts which will make progress grind to a halt.