DAVOS, Switzerland — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet ministers came to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos with a clear and direct message. If now was time for India to assert itself as a powerful economy, then “India has seized the moment.”

This message was hammered home to audience members at a session on Thursday titled “Can India seize its moment?” Hardeep Singh Puri, minister of petroleum, natural gas, housing and urban affairs, kicked off the panel session, saying it already had.

Smriti Zubin Irani, minister for women and child development and the head of the Indian delegation to the Davos conference, repeated the same line.

Indicators gauging the country’s economy have backed up this bullish view.

Last month, the Asian Development Bank revised India’s annual growth rate forecast for the financial year through March 2024 to 6.7% from 6.3%, outpacing all major economies in the region including China’s 5.2% for the calendar year in 2023. India is expected to maintain momentum next fiscal year, while China’s growth is forecast to taper off to 4.5% in 2024.

India’s equity market was one of the best performers among the region’s benchmarks last year, with the Sensex Index gaining 18.7% for the year, outpaced only by Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average and Taiwan’s Taiex.

Meanwhile the CSI300, which encompasses blue chips in the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges, lost over 11%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, predominantly consisting of top Chinese names, dipped 13.8%. They were two of the worst performers, slightly ahead of Thailand’s SET Index.

In the latest survey released by BofA Securities on Tuesday, major fund managers were net 18% overweight on India, second only to Japan’s 59% among major Asia-Pacific markets. This is in sharp contrast to China, where it remains 20% underweight. The survey was conducted this month, covering 256 funds with aggregate assets under management of $669 billion.

Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of railways, communications, electronics and information technology, cited four pillars that have been instrumental in transforming the Indian economy over the last decade under Modi: building physical and digital infrastructure, achieving inclusive growth, enhancing the manufacturing sector, and cutting red tape.

Some of the figures he provided were eye-catching.

For instance, 510 million bank accounts were opened over the past 10 years, meaning a substantial portion of lower income people were “brought into the formal financial system,” Vaishnaw said.

On deregulation, more than 1,500 laws and statutes were repealed, including the abolishment of many colonial period laws and procedures. The telecom sector benefitted greatly, with the time it takes to obtain a permit to set up mobile base station slashed from an average of 230 days to just seven days.

Formal job creation in 2019 totaled about 600,000 a month, but has increased to 1.5 million a month recently, Vaishnaw said.

James Quincey, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola who was on the same panel, agreed with the ministers. “India’s moment is for the private sector to seize,” he said, adding that he expects consumption to grow faster than gross domestic product.

For the Atlanta, U.S.-based company, India is already the fifth-largest market globally with 54 plants and 50,000 direct employees. Quincey vowed to pump up the level of annual investment to $1 billion from around $750 million in the past few years.

India’s rise comes at a time when signs of China’s economic slowdown have become prevalent, including two consecutive years of population decline.

The total population drop in China last year was about 2.08 million, according to the statistics bureau’s announcement on Wednesday. The decline was steeper than the 850,000 in 2022, which was the first drop since 1961 during the Great Famine that followed the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign led by Mao Zedong.

While India’s 2023 population data is not yet available, it is set to surpass China’s 1.409 billion, adding to growth prospects in the years to come.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang, who spoke in Davos on Tuesday, emphasized the country’s economic strength, including its domestic market being vast. “Choosing the Chinese market is not a risk but an opportunity,” he said. However, as India is about to overtake China in population, Beijing’s standard line does not resonate as it did in the past.

Samir Saran, president of New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, said India’s GDP as a whole and per capita stands at about the same level 15 years ago of a country which is now the “single-most important partner for over 100 countries worldwide.”

Alluding to China, but without mentioning it by name, he stressed that India is at an inflection point similar to when the world’s second-largest economy began attracting investments globally. He said he believes “India is now at that moment.”