Having lived in China for an extended period (most of two decades) and traveled India for months, I think a "15 years behind" narrative is highly misconstrued, even at that point. I first visited China in '98 and India in 2000. India was laying its first fiber optics in New Delhi, while China was kicking out European suppliers after having mastered its own cellular equipment, cloned Cisco and began to broadcast free to air IP protocol suite TV documentaries to 1.4 billion people. By the 2010s China had hosted the Olympics and had a space station and a viable navigation satellite constellation, a high speed rail network, an aircraft carrier and was advancing domestic airline production. India was then and is now permanently behind China with a completely disparate and arguably negative trajectory: there's no viable temporal offset narrative. In my view the biggest issues in India are treatment of women, the caste system, corruption and poverty.