CHINA HAS MINERALS, INDIA HAS ITS PEOPLE

In 1992, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly said that if West Asia had oil, China would have rare earths.

- BY DEEPA VASUDEVAN

In two decades, China was actually dominating the rare earths chain end-to-end, from mining to magnets. Today, it controls a 70% global share in the mining of rare earths, 90% of their processing and 93% of magnet production. Not surprisingly, China uses this monopoly as a political bargaining chip, as the world has seen over the past year. Does India have a similar secret sauce? Or, an equivalent resource that the world needs but cannot easily replicate or replace? The answer is not mineral or metal. It is India's people. Demographic dividend has for long been touted as India's superpower, but the progress in making it truly click remains insufficient.

DEMOGRAPHIC DELUGE

INDIA HAS a unique combination of population size and age distribution, which gives it a massive number of young people. The UN estimates that in 2025, the world's working-age population-generally defined as persons aged 15 to 64 years-will be around 5.3 billion.

Of this, India alone contributes slightly over a billion, exceeding China's share of 986 million. Indonesia, with 194 million, is in distant third place.

This trend may persist over the next decade. By 2040, India is likely to have a 19% share in the global workingage population, and a similarly high share of persons in younger age categories. No other nation can match India in sheer numbers of young working adults, and this lends its demographic dividend considerable heft.

The developed world is already ageing, and China's demographic profile is shifting towards older cohorts. Emerging markets with similar median ages (such as Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa) don't compare in terms of the magnitude of the working-age population.