Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero

It is the only major economy in the world that in 2022 and 2023 will continue to grow at a rate of over 7% (China will not be able to reach the 5% and the European Union risks seeing the great rebound promised by the NEXT GENERATION EU transformed into a recession). By number of UNICORN (the unlisted START UPs worth more than a billion dollars that are changing the world) it ranks third in a ranking dominated by the United States and China. And speaking of size, India is overtaking China: according to the United Nations, by 2027 it will be - with 1.5 billion citizens - the most populous country in the world. Finally, India may be a case that the same Minister of Technological Transition, Vittorio Colao, can observe with interest: it was from a digital modernization program carried out by the Indian government that the innovations that are leading India to be, according to the Economist, the growth engine that can replace China. And, however, Europe is far behind in political and commercial relations with what is a continent that is racing.

When, in 2002, this writer arrived to the New Delhi airport for the first time, the first impact with India was the need to withdraw in rupees - the national currency - the equivalent of 1000 euros needed to pay the first part of the exploration of a fantastic world. The use of credit cards and, even, ATMs was marginal and, moreover, travellers were given a quantity of small-denomination banknotes difficult to contain in their luggage from the exchange offices. Part of the fascination that India exerted on Westerners was linked to the fact that it was a country immersed in a medieval age of spectacular poverty and fascinating insights. Hundreds of millions of Indians technically did not exist, in the sense that they escaped any registration (save for a tiring periodic census). The same was true for millions of micro-enterprises of an underground economy and never reached by a taxation system made complicated by a myriad of heavy taxes decided by each of the 28 federated states and 8 territories into which the Union is divided.

Today, India is a completely different country and, probably, it can be - just like China - the representation of how much in the 21st century, the initial impulse of a state that becomes an "entrepreneur" is decisive for the growth of a country (in the case of India and China, however, it should be called an "innovator"). Although, it is disturbing that in India, as well as in China, that initial innovation came from a state that is moving away from the standards of liberal democracies.

In India it was Premier Narendra Modi who supported the continuation of a modernization that had begun, however, with his predecessor and political opponent, the economist MANMOHAN Singh. It was Singh who introduced in 2009 a citizen identification system (called AADHAAR) which links personal data to biometric data - fingerprints and photos of the iris - and which led an immense underground society to have one of the most technologically advanced in the world. However, it was Modi who continued the work by linking to that system other modernizations that technology made possible: a robust reduction in cash and the development of a national payment system; the creation of a digital infrastructure capable of reaching the campaigns; the construction of a welfare system capable of transferring unemployment benefits directly to the current accounts of hundreds of millions of people; the simplification and centralization of the tax system. On this basis, India is creating great opportunities for its companies and engineers and transferring resources from microscopic companies to more efficient multinationals.

Thirty years ago, the Indian economy was - albeit poor - as large as the Chinese one; after thirty years it is five times smaller. For some years, however, the trend has been reversing. Now, the opportunity is to replace China in supplying the West with higher-value parts of production chains. The paradox, however, is that, today, India seems more like its great neighbour. The Freedom House think tank, which measures the levels of freedom in the various countries of the world, records a significant reduction in a country in which the ethnic characteristics of power (and the discrimination of Islamic minorities) are accentuated. The same great innovation of electronic identity introduced thirteen years ago would be technically impossible in many Western countries: in particular, in Europe which with its own regulations on personal data (GDPR) has given "privacy" a higher priority than that assigned to the growth and simplification of relations between state and citizen.