Lee Kuan Yew once warned, “What I fear is complacency. When things always become better, people tend to want more for less work.” For Singapore, embracing hard-edged competition, rewarding performance, and building clean, durable institutions became the country’s central strategy at a moment when almost every indicator suggested the young nation might fail. That mixture of urgency and institutional discipline is what turned vulnerability into advantage.

China, in its own way, stumbled onto a similar truth. Strip away the rhetoric and you find a system where provinces, cities and even districts push against one another in a constant contest to deliver more—more investment, more infrastructure, more growth. Officials rise when they produce results and quietly fade when they don’t. It is not democracy, and it carries costs that India would rightly avoid, but the underlying instinct—to treat governance as a performance craft rather than a ceremonial duty—is a lesson worth watching.

Telangana shows how democratic politics can still produce that kind of disciplined delivery. Hyderabad’s ascent into a tech and life-sciences hub was not the product of a single grand plan; it came from steady, sometimes mundane, administrative choices. Time-bound approvals, predictable power, an active investor facilitation cell and a bureaucracy that was allowed to execute for years without constant political reinvention created an environment where firms could plan and scale. That credibility compounded: more investors came because earlier investors had succeeded. Telangana’s gain was not ideological; it was organisational — a simple trust-building loop between state and market.

Punjab offers the counterpoint. Once a symbol of agricultural modernity and relative prosperity, it now reads like a cautionary note about what happens when politics crowds out purpose. Growth slipped, per-capita gains stalled and job creation lagged. More than the numbers, though, the story is one of churn: frequent leadership changes, shifting priorities, and administrative reshuffles that turn long-term projects into episodic headlines. Investors, young professionals and even civic confidence tend to vote with their feet; over time the state pays the price. Punjab didn’t lose its people’s skill — it lost the steady habit of competing well.

Why does this matter for India as a whole? Because the heavy lifting of development happens in states. Delhi can set visions and launch national missions, but hospitals are run by state health departments, factories need state power and land policies, schools are administered locally. If states treat governance as theatre, we get spectacles. If they treat it as a discipline, we get results. The national conversation must shift from which slogan wins votes to which state delivers measurable improvements in lives and livelihoods.

This is not a call for centralising power or mimicking authoritarian methods. It’s a call for political cultures that prize continuity over chaos, for bureaucracies rewarded for outcomes rather than tenure, and for citizens who demand results, not rhetoric. Practical tools can help: legally backed timelines for approvals, bipartisan project charters for major infrastructure, transparent performance scorecards for public officials, and inter-state peer review mechanisms that celebrate and replicate success.

The uncomfortable truth Lee Kuan Yew warned about is real: complacency is quiet, polite and corrosive. India can afford none of it. If states embrace disciplined competition—if they choose steady credibility over episodic drama—then the nation’s 2047 ambitions are not fantasy but a plausible outcome. If they do not, India risks watching small leaks become structural failures.

The battle for a developed India will not be decided in New Delhi alone. It will be decided in state capitals where leaders either build trust through steady delivery, or lose it through perpetual political theatre. Choose competition, not complacency — and the rest will follow.