On the face of it, there is room for optimism. As China seeks to wean itself off supercharged investment, its economy will inevitably slow. Officially, growth will glide down to 7 per cent this year. More likely, it could quickly head towards 5 per cent or below. India, meanwhile, is expected to expand at 7.7 per cent.

Unlike many other emerging economies, including fellow Brics nations Brazil, Russia and South Africa, India has not been buoyed by exports of high-priced commodities. That means it will not be dragged down by the Chinese-
induced commodities slump. Far from it. India, the world’s third-biggest petroleum importer , benefits greatly from weak oil prices, which improve its current account position and ease inflationary pressures. Nor is India a big exporter of manufactured goods. Even if global demand is weak, its economy is relatively insulated, with 57 per cent of gross domestic product coming from household consumption.

Yet the idea that India is poised to become the global economy’s main event is flawed to say the least. If it induces complacency, it is positively dangerous. Hopes that India can replace China as the engine of global growth are wide of the mark. In nominal terms — the most appropriate measure when judging an economy’s global impact — India’s output is one-fifth that of China’s. India makes up a mere 2.5 per cent of global GDP against a hefty 13.5 per cent for China. If China grew at 5 per cent annually, it would add an Indian-sized economy to its already hefty output in less than four years. Saying India can match this is like saying a mouse can pull a tractor.

On balance, people have read too much into China’s market spasms. Certainly, botched attempts to prop up the stock market and to move to a more flexible exchange rate have shaken confidence in the perceived infallibility of Chinese policymaking. Certainly, too, recent turmoil is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the Chinese economy as it goes through the pain of shifting from investment-led to consumption-led growth. For China, the days of relatively easy catch-up have ended. Yet to write China off is badly misguided. It has the momentum of 30 years’ extraordinary expansion behind it.

The idea that India will effortlessly float above Chinese growth levels is hopelessly smug. India’s statistics are as dubious as those of China. People forget that only last February, India changed the way it calculated GDP, adding more than 2 percentage points to its headline growth rate. On the old measure, India is still limping along at a far from impressive 5 per cent.

Inflated growth breeds a false sense of security. That may help explain why Mr Modi’s government has been so slow to pass much-trumpeted reforms. In this session of parliament, almost nothing has been done. The prime minister has been unable to enact a goods and services tax, which economists agree would make it easier to do business across a diverse set of states. Faced with opposition from farmers, he has all but abandoned land reform, which would have made it simpler to build factories, roads and power plants. Doing business in India continues to be anything but easy.

While the country is relatively isolated from the world economy, that is partly because it does not make much that others deem worth buying. For a country that wants to be the manufacturing hub to replace China, that seems more like a weakness than a strength.

None of these problems will disappear because rather dubious statistics say India is growing faster than China. Indian officials would do well to stop gloating — and start enacting some meaningful change.