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.