While Beijing is already hosting the 2008 Olympics, any Indian city would take years or probably decades to even think of achieving this feat. While China is known for skyscrapers, Indian cities are known for their slums. Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, is home to the largest slum in Asia and almost half of the city's inhabitants are slum-dwellers.
Of late, there have been increasingly tall claims of making Mumbai the next Shanghai. Whether Mumbai can achieve that feat even in the next 50 years is in itself another debate but that's besides the point. A more pertinent question to ask would be whether Mumbai should even try to become Shanghai in the first place. Mumbai, in particular, and Indian cities in general, are in a dilapidated condition and have miles to go before they can be even called cities. I don't think any Indian city should even aim for becoming a Shanghai or a Shenzhen for that matter. In fact, I would go one step further and criticise China for going overboard in creating such magnificent cities.
If a rich man owns a Ferrari, then the world looks at him with awe, but what would you call a not-so-well-off man who flaunts the same car? Chinese cities are often spoken of in the same breath as the cities in the developed world, such as New York, London and Tokyo. This compels one to wonder whether China is indeed a developing country or a developed one. With a per capita income of $2,000 (developed countries typically have a per capita income of $40,000), it is far from being a developed nation. And China has more than its share of Ferraris