This is an empirically accurate assessment. The priorities of the Anglophone elite (which dominate the IAS and other parts of the admin) are divorced from the priorities of the rest of the country. This manifests in issues akin to what they call “structural racism “ in the US.

Ie: budgeting priorities; India over budgets IITs and other elite institutions over other colleges and primary education. This results in a system with excellent top universities, but a steep drop in educational quality in tier 2 institutions (and very low educational outcomes in public primary and secondary schools).

The government also focuses on agricultural price stability over farm income (ie banning agricultural exports during high prices).

One can argue that the popularity of Modi and the other regional satraps (with language based sub nationalism) is a result of this institutional bias. Imagine how you would vote if you couldn’t participate in the economy of your hometown because all the street signs/store names were in a language you couldn’t read.

>The government also focuses on agricultural price stability over farm income (ie banning agricultural exports during high prices).

Given the farm law protests I don't know if you can pin that one on the anglophone elite.

That's interesting because for a long time there's been this right-wing narrative about how "India benefited from British colonization."

I suppose the British did introduce some technology and civic systems, but they also probably fractured the society and created a new kind of caste system.

How much of today's seeming culture of corruption in India is a legacy of colonialism vs. how much was there already? I'm asking because I'm only looking from a distance.

Also makes me wonder if the Chinese cultural revolution, while a disastrous failure on very many levels, might have erased a lot of the legacy of past colonialism... for the same reason that a gigantic natural disaster might lead to shiny new infrastructure after everything gets rebuilt.