Indian industry so far has been led by many of the big business families and conglomerates that dominated when India was still a quasi-socialist, heavily regulated economy.

They generally have done a good job of taking advantage of new opportunities offered by liberalization since the early 1990s. But the more dynamic companies in India are smaller ones that are led by new generations of entrepreneurs who take greater risks or are more connected to the global economy.

These new companies also have more creative managers, argues Debashis Ghosh, another Keystone partner who worked at Ernst & Young.

Keystone focuses on researching mid-sized Indian companies with $10 million to $100 million in annual sales.

"The bigger companies are still led by oldschool types who used to depend on access to government and got huge when there was nobody else in the game.

"Because they had scale, foreigners had to deal with them," says Ghosh.

"Now, though, the top talent from the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management are flowing into the mid-sized sector. That is like getting a management team of all Wharton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology grads."

As a result, he contends that the Indian companies of the future are more dynamic than those of China, where management tends to be weak.

Image: Visitors climb the Great Wall at Badaling on New Year's day. | Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images