Is it cultural, or is it just the result of the boom cycle making it easier to make a rupee by following rather than leading?

My gut instinct is that the sad state of Indian IT is purely a result of being supported by clueless management in developed countries thinking they can easily save big bucks by outsourcing. India is just filling a demand.

After a decade or two of Indians growing up in this economy and seeing the failures first hand, I predict things will have equalized quite a bit, and the smart Indians will all be saying "Why work for clueless bosses when we can do better and we have huge markets of our own?" Of course that process will be kickstarted by Indian expats witnessing the failures of enterprise IT firsthand in the richest corporations of the world.

Throughout school they're ranked against their peers. This extends to a National ranking, where only the top n% can get into IIT. Their high schools are also heavily basied on rote memorization-type learning.