As India marks 25 years since the advent of economic reforms, it’s hard to escape the note of self-congratulation in much of the commentary the anniversary has inspired.

Indeed, by most measures there is much to celebrate. In terms of sheer numbers, only China has pulled more people out of extreme poverty faster than India. In 1991, more than four decades after Independence, nearly half of Indians lived on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank’s current measure for extreme poverty. Today only about one in five slip below that benchmark.

By a rough calculation, that’s about 375 million fewer poor people than if the poverty rate had remained unchanged. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Indian per capita income more than tripled from about $550 in 1991 to $1,800 last year. As a result, an entire generation has grown up expecting upward mobility where their parents and grandparents accepted stagnation.

At the same time, India’s weight in the world has grown. In 1991, the world’s second most populous country accounted for a scant 3.6% of global gross domestic product. By 2015 this had nearly doubled to 7%. The World Bank estimates that India’s trade to GDP ratio nearly tripled from 16.7% in 1991 to 49% in 2014. Simply put, pre-reform India was economically insignificant and cut off from the world. Today it is an important player in the global economy, and as dependent on trade for its prosperity as China or Indonesia.

Or take foreign direct investment. In 1991, still tainted in the world’s eyes by its failed experiment with socialism, India attracted a meagre $240 million in inflows, less than a fourth of what Indonesia managed. Last year, more than $44 billion worth of FDI poured into India, about three times what Indonesia attracted, and a staggering 183 times more than the 1991 figure.

In short, the story of the past quarter century has been incontrovertibly positive for India. Not everyone has benefited equally, but life has improved faster for more people than at any time before. If these trends hold – and there’s no reason they shouldn’t – most readers of this newspaper will see extreme poverty abolished in their lifetimes. For previous generations of Indians this would have been hard to imagine, let alone take for granted.

But while the gains from economic reform are impossible to refute, the picture looks less rosy when you benchmark India not against its own dismal past, but against its peers in Asia.

For instance, the World Health Organization estimates that the average Indian lives 10 years longer today (68 years) than a quarter century ago. But he has yet to catch up with the average Indonesian (69 years), and continues to lag the average Chinese (76 years). Between 1991 and 2015 India slashed infant mortality by more than half – from 86 deaths to 38 deaths per 1,000 births. But that’s still nearly twice as high as infant mortality in Indonesia, and four times as high as in China.

Or take mobile phones, widely cited as a defining feature of India’s post-reform economic miracle. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that mobile subscriptions in India reached 79% last year, up from 62% just five years earlier. That sounds awfully impressive until you realise that in China the mobile penetration rate is 93% and in Indonesia it’s a stratospheric 132%.

In other words, India is much better off than it was a generation ago. But, purely in terms of prosperity and human development, it’s impossible to argue that the average Indian is better off than her peers in China and Indonesia.

In the warm glow of revisiting the 1991 reforms, former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao is enjoying a well-deserved comeback in the public imagination. In “Half-Lion”, political scientist Vinay Sitapati recalls the combination of guile and decisiveness that allowed Rao to dismantle much of Jawaharlal Nehru’s economic legacy while leading a party ostensibly committed to upholding it. Nehru’s folly – exacerbated greatly by Indira Gandhi – was to associate trade with exploitation, and to believe that wise bureaucrats could delegate resources better than markets. Rao effectively challenged both ideas.

Though Rao began his political career as a socialist himself, over time he grasped how badly the Indian experiment had soured, allowing countries that had lagged India in the 1950s to race ahead by the 1980s. Rao’s most consequential successor thus far, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, shared these twin insights: that independent India had erred in choosing state-led development, and that as a result it trailed much of East Asia.

What of Narendra Modi? There’s no question that the prime minister would like to see a strong and prosperous India. But we’re yet to see him make a full-throated case for further reforms such as rationalising labour laws and privatising state-owned firms in sectors of the economy better suited to the private sector.

India has come a long way by ending industrial licensing and embracing world trade. But in a democracy there’s only so far that the Rao model – reform by guile, not public persuasion – can go. Two years ago, many people hoped that Modi would apply his considerable gifts of communication to sell tough but necessary reforms to the public. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting.