A bloodless transition?

Expect a global shift in power to China and India.

Sixty years from now, you will be able to fly in a hyper-plane from Mumbai to New York in two hours. You will be able to replace defective body parts, through bio-engineering, at one of the many medi-cities that have been set up; indeed, the human body in many cases will have integral components that are man-made, and could routinely include metal and plastic objects sutured in under your skin.

You will have won, after a fierce debate, the right to euthanasia, as extended human life increasingly makes death a voluntary act (is life really worth living after 100?). The thrust of creativity and of the sustainability debate, and therefore of a great deal of innovation, will have shifted from miniaturised electronics and so-called "new" forms of energy to bio-mimicry. And trucks will move on the highways with the orderliness of railway wagons hitched to a locomotive, as sensors keep the trucks equi-distant and running at the same speed on cruise control.

These are not pies in the sky. If you want to know more about the potential of bio-mimicry, visit the biomimicryinstitute.org website and look at the work being done by Janine Benyus and her team. The technology for flying hyper-planes exists and experimental planes are already being tested on unannounced flights.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's mis-named Media Lab, they have been doing research for years on how you can exchange information about each other, of the kind contained on a business card, through a simple handshake (the secret is bio-engineering).

The research on sensors that can keep vehicles equi-distant (and also help you park blind) has been done at a DaimlerChrysler research centre in Bangalore. And the voluntarisation of death is already not such a novel idea in some countries, so you can plan your death with all the fanfare of a wedding, including playing your favourite music.

Technology has changed the world these past 60 years, including India (think of the mobile phone and of e-mail, paperless share trading and ATMs-and of the businesses they have spawned or transformed), and will do so again. All countries will be caught up in this, because it is a safe bet that the time gap between technology adoption by one country and another will shrink, a process that has already begun.

Turn next to power equations. The last time the global power balance swung was 500 years ago, when the "centre" of the world began to shift from China and India to Europe and then, across the Atlantic, to the United States.

Now the pendulum is swinging back and, barring accidents, China and India could once again account for close to half of the world's GDP (compared to about 7 per cent today). Do such power shifts happen peacefully? That was not the case the last time round "" the colonialists fought wars to gain territory and control of economies, and to make the Chinese people addicted to opium.

Perhaps there were no global rules preventing gunboat diplomacy then, as we think there are now. But whether or not there is military conflict between the US and China, are the rules of global trade beginning to break down, as fear and protectionist sentiment grow in the West?

Are global investment rules about to be rewritten, because the Western countries don't want companies controlled by the Chinese government (or other unacceptable elements) to buy their companies "" though the reverse was always acceptable? In other words, will there be a reversal of global integration "" as happened once earlier, in 1914, after four decades of globalisation?

What about passport and visa rules? Can they really stand in the way of millions of people swarming across borders in the US and Europe, or being shipped in boats across the Mediterranean? Indeed, won't ageing countries in northern Europe and Japan need more immigrants?

Will mono-culture countries across the world then become as multi-cultural as, say, London is today? What, then, about the clash of civilisations "" especially if the countries of South Asia decide that they should make borders as irrelevant as they are in western Europe?

As for economic trends, most forecasters simply extrapolate using current trends, with or without minor modifications. If the Indian economy has doubled in size over the last decade, most people assume that we will do that again in the coming decade, and repeat that in the decade to follow "" making GDP by 2027 four times what it is today and India a true middle-income country (comparable with the income levels that Malaysia, Mexico, Poland and Venezuela have today, but with an infinitely larger number of people).

As those comparisons make clear, even if the GDP growth forecasts turn out to be true, it does not say very much about what kind of society we will have "" in terms of equality levels (Poland is less unequal than India today, the others are much worse), the political system (how much more will our version of the

Westminster system have morphed by then?), corruption levels, and the structure of the economy (will we be energy-rich, for a change, as Mukesh Ambani's grandson becomes the energy tsar of the world?).

If one were to turn a Hubble-level economoscope into the more distant reaches of time, and peer ahead to 2067, it will be even more difficult to define what we find.

For instance, population growth will have levelled off after 2027 as income levels rise and urbanisation spreads; that should mean slower economic growth because we no longer enjoy a "demographic dividend". But we don't really know how slow, and Goldman Sachs's forecast is as good as yours or mine.

One thing is for certain, though. If we do quadruple our GDP by 2027 and then double it again over the next 40 years, the Indian economy will be $8 trillion. If China, starting with an economy that is more than twice as big as India's, gets its GDP up to $10 billion, then the combined addition of economic activity in the two countries will be more than the US is today. None of this can happen if we don't find an alternative to hydrocarbon fuels.

In short, we don't really know what the next 60 years will bring. The mega-question is whether the big issues of energy, sustainability and power shift (and you could add water) will bring radical discontinuities, or whether the world will manage orderly change.

The answer to that will be influenced in no small measure by how the two winners of the coming half-century, India and China, behave between now and then. Among many transitions, India will have to learn to become a player, not remain an observer or critic with a limited stake in the global system. Because the biggest change will be that the rest of the world will have become much more a part of India, and vice versa.