Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements.
And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability.
Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.
Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds.
But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything.
The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.