development vs education

Most politicians in China are engineers.
The profession also precludes their manner of thinking on development.
In China, their infrastructure are engineering feats - highways, buildings, malls, dams, cities, etc

These kind of infrastructural feats require a long term focus.
Infrastructure projects require large investments with a ROI over a long period of time. Given the nature of the scale of investments and time period required to recoup these investments, governments more than private entities look at infrastructural projects.
And a governments ability to do such projects on development are pretty much dependent on the polity of the country.

As these kind of projects take a long time to reap a return the projects are planned
with a long term focus in terms of their use, utility and application.

If you look at most of the roads, railways and bridges in India we should be
thankful to British Engineers.

We in India, have been using these networks even today that the British constructed about 100 years ago. That is what long term thinking yields - projects that can be used over long period of time.

The China we see today is about engineering. Their engineering feats have paved the way to a structured development of towns and cities. So in China, we have on one hand the polity from an engineering background and their social development and planing employing engineering.

The moot point is did this change begin with a polity being educated as engineers or a development that required engineers.
The query is that of development vis a vis education.

In India, the emphasis has been on education rather than on development. Since independence, India has focused primarily on Education. Ironically Education levels seems to have stagnated at some threshold level of 60%-70% across states.

On the other hand, I can't say the emphasis has not been on development, as ironically we still face infrastructural bottlenecks, improper planing and shoddy execution. Development in India, very particularly lacks the kind of feats that China has accomplished. Our Infrastructure seems to lack long term planing, and so our cities are clogged and suffers from an influx of immigrants from town and villages.

The question is, China has been able to use education (engineering) to fuel
their development. While we have not been able to use education to fuel our development as compared to similar development in China.

It could be that our polity lacks Engineers. And so the polity does not have a government that can make serious steps in development. The profession of lawyers comes second to the profession that most politicians in our country seem to have.
The profession that most politicians in our Cabinet have is 'Others'.(So states the Economist). My guess is the profession termed 'Others' is used to make up for the lack of a serious one. I guess since we have our country run by non-professionals, or the ones who have no profession, the results in our infrastructure and development are evident.

Mature economies like UK and USA have politicians who are lawyers. But then they being mature democracies have plateaued on development needs. In addition, these economies have systems that perhaps need to be maintained or continued and lawyers are rightly suited for this role. So in a sense at their scale, lawyers in the polity would still serve their needs.

A young country like ours which is 60 years old needs a polity that can bring about development and we need a polity that is professionally educated to bring about such development. A polity with no profession serves a severe impediment to our country.