India emerges as third pole in Asia power rankings

India has re-entered the Lowy Institute’s “major power” bracket, a symbolic shift that underlines how its economic scale, strategic weight and demographic advantages are starting to show up more clearly in regional power metrics.

The Australian think tank’s Asia Power Index 2025 gives India a comprehensive power score of 40.0, up 0.9 points from last year and just over the 40-point line that Lowy uses to separate major powers from middle ones.

India is now the third most powerful country in the ‘Asia-Pacific system,’ according to the Lowy Index, behind the US and China and ahead of Japan and the major middle powers.

Lowy notes that India has “regained” the major-power threshold in 2025, indicating it had previously crossed 40 points in the 2020 edition, when India’s score was around 41, before slipping back during the pandemic years.

The index is built from 131 indicators grouped into eight measures, spanning both resources, including economic size, military capability, resilience and future resources, and forms of influence such as economic relationships, defense networks, diplomatic reach and cultural appeal.

India’s latest upgrade is less about a sudden leap in a single area than about several long-running trends pulling in the same direction.

On economic capability, the index now ranks India third, behind only the US and China and ahead of Japan, reflecting its recent move past Japan into third place globally by nominal GDP on IMF projections.

Lowy links the improvement to strong growth momentum, rising inward investment and India’s growing role in supply-chain diversification as multinationals look for alternatives to China.

Those economic shifts are beginning to show up in India’s external ties. For the first time since the index was created, India’s ranking for “economic relationships” has inched up, rising one place to ninth on the back of deeper trade and investment links.

The move is modest, but it breaks a pattern of stagnation in a measure where India has long under-performed relative to its size.

Future resources are another structural advantage. India ranks third on this measure as well, with Lowy highlighting its large, still-growing working-age population and relatively strong long-term growth prospects.

In demographic terms, that sets India apart from China, whose population has already begun to shrink, and gives it a potential edge over other ageing Asian economies over the coming decades.

On hard power, India’s military capability score has also improved. It remains fourth in the region on this measure and fourth on resilience.

The index notes gains in military capability and points to a combination of higher defense capital spending and modernization, particularly at sea, where India has been expanding its naval presence in the Indian Ocean and tightening defense cooperation with partners such as the US, France and Australia through logistics and access agreements.

Where India continues to lag is in converting these growing resources into sustained regional influence. Its weakest measure is defense networks, where it ranks eleventh, down two places from last year, overtaken by the Philippines and Thailand, and its economic relationships score, while improving, is still only ninth.

India is not part of any formal military alliance and has been slower than some peers to sign broad, liberalizing trade agreements across East and Southeast Asia.

This shortfall is captured in Lowy’s “Power Gap” metric, which compares the influence a country actually exerts with the level predicted by its underlying resources.

India’s power gap remains negative and has “expanded slightly, to its largest ever gap,” meaning its regional footprint still falls short of what its economic and military base would imply.

The index also shows that India’s gains are occurring in a shifting regional landscape. The US and China still dominate the rankings, classified as “super powers” with scores above 70, but both face slower momentum and mounting strategic pushback.

Japan, Russia, Australia and South Korea sit in a cluster of high-end middle powers behind India that have mostly moved sideways rather than sharply up in overall power scores.

The broader implication is a more multipolar Asia, but with an uneven distribution of power. With India back above the 40-point mark, the region now has a third pole of scale, even though the gap with China remains large in absolute terms.