While a decent overview, it peddles several opinions as fact without indicating whether the opinions are commonly-held or if some of them are contested. For example: "To make a serious dent in poverty, India needs to keep up economic growth of around 8% a year" .. "Some 65% of Indians live on agriculture, which accounts for less than 18% of GDP. Shifting them to more productive livelihoods ..." .... "India’s other big constraints, its cumbersome labour and land laws, should be easier to fix..". All these statements are based on an beliefs/opinions that India needs to shift away from agriculture, that higher economic growth automatically translates to reduced poverty, and that land acquisition for industrial and non-agricultural economic enterprises need to be made easier. Yet, these opinions are not without opponents. Land conflicts in India are not something marginal -- they have been the basis for lot of social movements (past and present) in India, many of them centered around impacts on agriculture, and what kind of development needs to be followed, who gets to decide, etc. All of this gets conveniently buried behind the various opinions in the article that masquerade as facts. If nothing, at least an acknowledgement of these conflicts (and not all are Maoist insurgencies, mind you) would have done the article a whole world of good. And this: "Indeed, because of India’s historic underinvestment in education, many are not obviously skilled at anything". Quite sweeping and damning an entire segment of the population! What the author wants to say is that many people are not skilled at what the English-speaking industrial globalized economy demands. What if I said that most of the US is not skilled at anything (while what I had in mind was a Kannada-speaking, earth-based, ultra-local, agrarian aconomy).