'Next 10 Years': Ray Dalio Bullish On India's Growth Story, Compares PM Modi To China's Xiaoping

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio has bullish bets for the next 10 years over India's long-term growth story and market opportunities. While speaking to Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's WTF Podcast, Dalio said that he believes India will achieve the best growth rate in the world over the next 10 years.

Dalio compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to China's late economic revolutionary Deng Xiaoping, crediting India’s demographic strength, low debt, infrastructure buildup, and reform momentum. The hedge fund veteran is strongly optimistic about India, calling its next 10 years potentially the best in the world.

"I think that India is at a wonderful arc in terms of its circumstances, its potential, and what it's developing. I think that President Modi is very much like Deng Xiaoping for China," said the founder of the world's biggest hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates.

Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese statesman, revolutionary, and political theorist who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from 1978 to 1989. Xiaoping is credited as the architect of modern China's economic reforms.

Explaining PM Modi's role in India's economic strength comparing him to Xiaoping, Dalio added, "What I mean by that is that he's creating changes. And when you have a country that can build its infrastructure and can build on that, and you don't have much debt, and you have a large talented population."

For the above reasons, Dalio has created some leading indicators of what countries have, as their ingredients, to project the next 10 years' growth rate. "India's best. India's going to have, probably the best fundamentals to have the best growth rate, in that. Because you're going from not having enough money to having... That has infrastructure," he explained.

Discussing the country's infrastructure development, Dalio said, "When you're building infrastructure, when you're creating the things that are happening, not only all the different infrastructure, including the ability to get credit and the ability to do transactions and so on, in that, that produces a growth curve, particularly if you don't have very much debt, and you have talented people."

"So, for those reasons, I think, India, over the next 10 years, has all the ingredients to really be the strongest growth rate and improvement," claimed the global market expert.

However, Dalio added that India "still has development to do". "It is more akin to where China was 30 years ago, maybe, than where China is today. So, it has that growth. The actual power of it is not as great as those other two countries," (US and China) he said.

Comparing US and China, Dalio believes China is ahead and behind in different ways. "For example, the inventiveness of new chips and the most advanced chips, the United States is a bit ahead. But the application to use the chips, whatever AI there is, to be able to integrate it into life and making it for the society, most applications and most effect, China's ahead," explained Dalio.