India has jobs for everyone at every level if you consider "temple beggar" to be a job and wizened old women in their sixties to be appropriate people to be doing road maintenance. $200 dollars per month sounds like an unusually generous salary for unskilled labour there too - engineering degree or no engineering degree. Of course, it also has plenty of opportunities for a growing middle class that didn't exist for their parents.

The reality is it's a developing country facing significant challenges, and no amount of trade liberalisation (or increased protectionism towards domestic manufacturing) is going to change that overnight. It's pretty hard to pin most of those challenges on the British destroying cottage weaving industries by dumping machine-made Manchester cotton on them in the early nineteenth century, or to argue that banning Apple Stores is a rational response likely to solve that problem.

Yeah, I'm not so sure.

On the one hand, there's stuff like this - https://twitter.com/pankaj/status/729417379730448384

Here you have SF entrepreneurs with vastly more capital & information than the average person in the US buying one way tickets to India.

Just last week, I had coffee with a YC founder who mentioned casually that "YC16 has dozens of startups out of Bangalore". He had conducted mock interviews for the accepted candidates & he was very excited for them & the Indian ecosystem. One or two companies is an outlier, but dozens ? That's a gamechanger.

At the same time you talk of "temple beggar jobs and 60 year old women doing road maintenance".

Am honestly unable to reconcile these opposing narratives.

>At the same time you talk of "temple beggar jobs and 60 year old women doing road maintenance". > Am honestly unable to reconcile these opposing narratives.

India is a massive complex country, just like the US. It has plenty of physical and cultural space to accommodate both those narratives. You might consider visiting there to see both play out at the same time for yourself - it's fascinating.

But you don't need to look as far as SF to India to find such opposing narratives. SF entrepreneurs with vast amounts of capital are in close proximity to many people right in the Bay Area working for low wages in marginal and informal jobs (day laborers, child-care workers, domestic maids), and even people in jobs that involve human oppression (human trafficking, etc).

EDIT: comment added.

There are basically two Indias: India has an educated middle class of significant size and a much larger (and much poorer) lower class. They exist side by side, so you get some contradictions if you try to treat India as one homogeneous population.

Why is it hard to believe that a country where a certain class of people has gone up in wealth and opportunity, other people are still stuck? What notahacker says its correct. There's more to India than just living in the urban centers of Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, etc.

Sure if you have an American middle class salary/savings and go to India you'll live a very luxurious life (by Indian standards). You'll have AC in your house, servants to come and clean and cook for you. You can hire a driver for road trips. However your surrounding environment will be worse off than compared to the US (pollution, smog, corruption, inadequate infrastructure)

The servants however are still living in poverty or close to poverty. Go outside a major city to the countryside and its still very underdeveloped.