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If all goes to plan on 22 October at 6.20am, the rocket Chandrayaan-1 will lift off from Sriharikota in India, heading for the Moon. This comes a year after China sent its satellite there. The space race between the two emerging economic giants is well under way. India is planning to pip China to the post in the race to put a man on the Moon. India in 2008 really believes it can and should reach for the stars.

Not everyone agrees. A headline on a national newspaper’s website said it all: ‘India should focus on the gutter before the stars’. Why, the argument goes, all this head in the clouds stuff when poverty within India manifests itself on a scale comparable with Sub-Saharan Africa?There are 800 million people in India living on less than $2 a day. Malnutrition, disease, a lack of basic sanitation or clean water are not confined to rural areas, but characterise India’s growing mega-slums also. And while it's true that India’s growth rates of around 8 per cent a year are high compared with the growth rates recently seen in the developed world, they are woefully insufficient to deal with the scale of poverty in the country.

Already running to catch up, India faces real economic and political challenges. Still reeling from the effects of high food and oil prices, the credit crunch is now spreading to the emerging economies. The IMF predicts that growth rates in India will slow in the coming years.

Added to the very real threat of economic slow down, full-stream ahead growth in India is hampered by what a recent Economist article dubbed India’s 'mutinous democracy'. The recent forced relocation of the Tata Nano plant is an example. The plant was designed to produce Tata’s flagship 'Nano' car - the 100,000 rupee car designed to be affordable for India's growing middle class. Tata has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into buying land and building a new car plant in West Bengal, only to be forced out by local political problems, amid accusations that compensation payments to local farmers were inadequate. This situation has been presented as an example of the growing conflict between the haves and the have-nots in Indian society. In the popular imagination, at least in the West, the 'untouchables' are fighting back.

It might be tempting to argue that India should downgrade industrial development in favour of policies that benefit the poor or even that India would gain from the sort of one-party state that guides planning in China. But it would be a mistake to impose a particular direction upon India as it works through the conflicts and problems generated by rapid growth.

How India deals with the contradictions generated by its development can only be determined by India itself. The political prejudices of Western commentators will not help. That India, a country with an income per head of less that $1,000, is flying to the moon isn't reflective of a society that has its head in the clouds and ignores the reality of poverty on the ground. Instead it shows a society that has the ambition to strive for more. This striving will not be straightforward and there will be hurdles to overcome. Yet as the saying goes ‘per ardua ad astra’ – through struggle to the stars. Ultimately it is this ambition to have more that will solve India’s problems of poverty and inequality.

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Stuart Simpson is a financial analyst and journalist. He is the author of Debt and Development: Ghana - a case study