But - their lives are incredibly hard. No protection from the state, no future, at mercy of anybody more rich than them (=anybody else), it doesn't matter how good you are, you will never be given a fair chance to achieve anything in society. Nobody cares if you live or die, how you suffer, how unfair your life is. There isn't even such a basic mentality that 'I deserve more in life than this', because countless generations before never achieved anything.
And specifically for India, the effin' idiotic caste system makes all others content with the situation, because 'this is how things are supposed to be', 'they accrued bad karma in their previous lives' and so on. It's extremely good that this system is slowly dying, but it will take far too long in my opinion, especially in rural areas.
Their life is reduced to day-to-day survival, which makes everything simpler. They don't have lofty goals for life, and surviving OK yet another day is a success. Is this a simplicity you want to have compared to western style of life? I don't think so.
There is a huge difference between making 2 dollars a day and making 4 or 8. This is long before we get to the rich end of the scale.
However, people can be rich in relationships and materially poor, or incredibly wealthy and yet have a string of broken relationships. Look at divorce rates, or even simply people living together, then breaking up and finding new partners in the United States, where economically speaking people live in one of the richest countries in the world.
Does anyone know of economic metrics that attempt to measure and/or account for relational and/or community richness or poverty?
But it's also ethically skewed. I have friends who have travelled through the poorest parts of Africa, and they universally return with stories about how "poor" Africans are some of the happiest, friendliest, most generous, and most contented people they've met.
That may be rose-tinted, but it's naive to dismiss it out of hand.
Economic metrics aren't necessarily humane, and the Western economic treadmill - with its precariousness, acquisitiveness, and narcissism - isn't necessarily the ideal destination for any culture.