I saw a similar post and I felt it was a bit misleading. So here's a more moderate take that tries to understand the situation that governments of both the era faced and why the graph looks the way it does.

The drop in the percentage value from 2004 to 2014 was not caused by India's economy stagnating, but rather by China experiencing an unprecedented, hyper-accelerated growth boom. During this period, the Indian economy actually performed very strongly by historical standards, but China grew at double-digit rates that outpaced almost every country in the world. China spent the early 2000s fully capitalizing on its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It became the undisputed "world's factory," driven by massive scale, heavy infrastructure spending, and total integration into global electronics and textile supply chains. Between 2004 and 2010, China’s annual GDP growth regularly hovered between 9% and over 14%. Because China's starting economic base in 2004 was already nearly 3 times larger than India's, growing at 10–12% annually allowed China to widen the absolute nominal and PPP gap dramatically every single year. India's GDP growth averaged roughly 7.5% to 8% during the UPA-I and early UPA-II years. This high growth rate successfully lifted roughly 140 million people out of poverty and significantly expanded the domestic middle class. India’s growth engine was predominantly fueled by domestic consumption and the IT/services boom rather than mass manufacturing. While services create high value, they do not absorb low-skill rural labor at the same massive, rapid scale that China's factory-led model did.

The sharp dip around 2016 can be attributed firstly to factors that were in NDA's control like demonetisation and rushed GST implementation which destabilized MSMEs and informal sector leading to flight of labour force back to agriculture, and secondly to factors they weren't in NDA's control like a massive NPA build up during the UPA era which forced banks to restrict lending, causing a sharp contraction in private corporate investment that dragged down growth through 2019. Post COVID-19 NDA benefitted from its prior push for digital public infrastructure, capital expenditure where they were spending aggressively on highways, freight corridors, and ports to lower logistics costs, and product linked incentive manufacturing schemes that attracted global supply chains.

On the other hand the sharp drop in 2020 highlights the stark difference in how both countries managed the initial phase of COVID-19. China implemented swift, localized lockdowns and rapidly restarted its manufacturing hubs to fulfill global demand for electronics and medical gear, achieving 2.2% positive growth in 2020. Conversely, India implemented a stringent nationwide lockdown that halted its domestic-dependent economy, resulting in a -5.8% economic contraction that year. Post COVID-19 China's growth was heavily reliant on property investment. The collapse of major developers (like Evergrande) severely deflated local government revenues and dented domestic consumer wealth. Additionally China's population is aging rapidly, and its working-age workforce is shrinking, which places a natural ceiling on manufacturing-led expansion.

Data: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?end=2025&locations=IN-CN&start=2025&view=bar](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?end=2025&locations=IN-CN&start=2025&view=bar)

India's GDP per capita PPP as a percentage of China's (2004-2025) with 2021 international dollar. It's a bit more nuanced than you think.