I think that at this point we classify countries as developed mostly by IHDI/HDI: (Inequality adjusted) Human Development Index. I'm from Romania, which I would classify as developing:

Romanian HDI: 0.802, IHDI: 0.714.

Indian HDI: 0.624, IHDI: 0.454

I think India still has a long way to go. So does China, in my opinion.

> I’m far from expert on this but how long can India be considered a “developing” nation

Certainly as long as the Ganges is not safe for human bathing or anything because there's feces, animal carcasses and other waste openly floating around (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/dadfae24-b23e-11e4-b380-00144feab...).

The problem with India seems to be that it's ultra polarized - you got the parts that have been launching rockets into space since 1975 (one even going to Mars), built nuclear weapons, use nuclear power... and you have the parts that have no roads, no sewage system, no nothing and which regularly make global headlines whenever a journalist goes off the big cities and travels into the deep rural areas and sees stuff that's unbelievable for him.

You don't have to even leave the big cities. In Gurgaon, India's "cyber city" next to Delhi, home to lots of shiny skyscrapers and glitzy shopping malls, you can drive along the main drag MG Road and see women squatting by the roadside manually pounding bricks to rubble, 8-year-olds operating food stalls next to the No Child Labor Certified factory, beggars with babies so sick they're turning blue and shitting themselves (amount of fucks given by passersby: zero), emaciated cows wandering on four-lane freeways, a naked swami doing his thing in a freeway offramp, families of construction workers living in shelters built from concrete barriers and a dusty tarp, etc.

This isn't something unique to India. I seem to remember reading an article somewhere that rural black communities in Alabama face similar issues. Granted, that seems to be more of an exception.

But what I took away from it is that communities that participate in the economic system do well for themselves and generate prosperity for themselves whereas those that don't (including most rural Indian villages) will continue to suffer from these issues.

North Korea now has ICBMs and nuclear weapons. This just shows what a committed state can achieve once it has it's priorities in order.

In India the classes are just looking out for themselves and keep looting each other when they have the opportunity to do so.

Take Bangalore now. The congress government here, has been openly siphoning money from the treasury for election funds or whatever. Now the state elections are going to be held in a few months, they are repairing roads, paying municipal workers and doing things they should have been doing throughout their term.

Now people here take exception to some European/American saying, why the hell does India have a space program etc when you have so many basic problems to fix. I take offense to that as well. Mainly because saving a small amount of money on that isn't automatically going to uplift hundreds of millions of impoverished Indians. It's hardly a drop in the bucket. Also because so many young people here graduate with engineering degrees, and they need something to look forward to.

The problem is that the people in charge realize that organizations like ISRO have to be shielded from the very system they govern and nurtured. They are OK with the same system perpetuating itself and hamstringing everything else. And it's not in their list of priorities to stop and reform this.

India's GDP per capita (in US$ inflation adjusted) has quadrupled since 2000, if that isn't developing then what is?

https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9...

What, you don’t think India is developing? Cause it sure as hell isn’t developed. Malnutrition is increasing in India as people have more opportunity to eat tasty but not particularly nutritious food. Open defecation is common over very large parts of the country. If you go to Mumbai there are migrant workers sleeping on the street all over the place. It’s getting better but there’s no way in hell it’s developed.

The classification as "developing" depends on what is being tracked. If measuring human development is a criteria to be evaluated, the UNDP tracks and computes since 1990 [0] the Human Development Index (HDI)[1] for several countries including India. India's HDI [2] is low relative to a country like Brazil [3].

[0] http://hdr.undp.org/en/data

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi

[2] http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/IND

[3] http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/BRA

The notion of considering a country “developing” or “developed” is quite outdated. It made some sense fifty or forty years ago but today most countries are somewhere in between and it’s not really possible to group countries into two groups “developed” and “developing” anymore.

Hans Rosling has made some interesting talks on this. Worth watching.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state

most of the Indian population still doesn't have access to toilets

It is surely a bad name, that imply that things are improving. But there is a distinguished set of countries that are not developed, and not undeveloped either.