Why the Indian economy is like Rohit Sharma

 It sounds silly to invoke cricket while reporting from the World Economic Forum at snow-bound Davos, but the talk here, for the past several years, makes you wonder if India is to the global economy what Rohit Sharma is to Test cricket.

Everybody acknowledges the talent, everybody wants him to succeed, every now and then there is a flash of brilliance, but overall there's underperformance, and the patience of both fan and selector could be running out.

India's promise has been acknowledged for more than a decade now. It was also seen to be coming out of its shell generally in the 2003-07 period. Global leaders, of nations as well as corporations, were expecting India to break out just in time to fill the void as China eventually slowed down. The latter has come to pass. But India isn't there yet.

India is still what it used to be, a nation with great potential, if only it got its act together. And that is a formidable 'if'.

How exactly is that 'if' to be defined? One succinct answer came here from the globally acknowledged, and feared, prophet of doom, economist Nouriel Roubini. In the India session built around Finance Minister Arun Jaitely, he said India, today, was in a sweet spot.

It just had to find ways and focus to make up for its capital deficit. India needed a lot more of all kinds of capital, in his words -- from physical infrastructure and skilled manpower to intellectual and regulatory capital.

It is a big ask -- to do all this fast enough to take advantage of the factors that genuinely place India in a sweet spot. The global panic is primarily because of a crash in commodity (especially oil) prices.

India, among all large economic powers, is the most significant net importer of commodities. This is benefiting India's strained fisc and trade balance.

There is a flight of foreign investors from the markets, but that may be transient, and that is where India could have moved faster to assert that vaunted position as a virtuous global exception. It still can.

But nice words apart, nobody is really convinced India will finally find its mojo. It is short-sighted to simply take home the pronouncements of well-known multi-national corporation leaders and gloat, particularly when these are made in the presence if national leaders.

For example, Cisco's John Chambers said, on the same panel, that 2016 was to be India's year, the year when India will break out. Cisco has a sizeable presence in India and is now taking over as the chair of the US-India Business Council. He has to say nice things to India. It's Nouriel Roubini's qualifications that are important.

The disappointment with India was understandable in the 2010-2014 period. The United Progressive Alliance was then seen to be losing political capital and its reformers, led by Manmohan Singh, were on the defensive.

The talk of mega scandals played conveniently into a rising anti-corporate sentiment globally. But it also left an impression, and rightly so, that India still had a huge regulatory deficit.

The old respect for India's slow, but solid, legal system also suffered with the Vodafone retrospective tax issue. The fisc and balance of trade were both out of control. All this was expected to change as Narendra Modi's National Democratic Alliance came to power with a full majority.