Just as the industrialised world — especially Japan — paid too little attention to India for too long, so there is a danger now of exaggerating the boom. India has seen many false dawns. The 1991 reforms, pushed through by Manmohan Singh, then the courageous Finance Minister and now the Prime Minister, were only a start. There are still huge bureaucratic obstacles: a “licence raj” not yet fully dismantled; a creaking infrastructure with potholed roads, aged airports and an overloaded electricity grid; a number of states with appalling local government and Naxalite uprisings; and a sprawling administration that may be demo- cratic but is held back by corruption, political rivalries and vested interests.

Despite all this, India’s growth is impressive. Over the past three years GDP growth has averaged 8.1 per cent annually. Over the next five years 71 million young people, a quarter of the world’s extra workers, will join the labour force. India boasts about two thirds of the global market in offshore services and about half the business processing operations. Its industrial corporations, pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers are moving swiftly into the global league. The middle class — roughly defined as anyone with a workable grasp of English — now numbers some 300 million people and is increasingly affluent. India’s share of scientific brainpower is impressive.

India still cannot match China’s relentless material advance. But for investors and for the country itself there are three big advantages: democracy, English and a free market. The first means that India is able to absorb almost any political shock without the system itself being threatened; the use of English, growing apace, gives the country global access and ensures the swift exploitation of the internet; and the readiness to contest ideas is creating sophisticated workers, managers and thinkers on a scale far beyond the means of a still restrictive China.

This month it will be 250 years since the fall of Calcutta to the Nawab of Bengal and the notorious Black Hole. Britain’s long and often fraught involvement in India has survived historic burdens and this country is now poised for a unique intellectual, economic and cultural partnership.

India has far to go to exploit its new strength: Dr Singh’s Government is slowed by its most recalcitrant communist allies. Villages, accounting for two thirds of the population, are still poor and backward. Early rain suggests a good monsoon and another year of relative prosperity. But India will need more than the rain to achieve the potential that the world now expects of it and wants for it.