> They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.

That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.

Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography

You can't just "borrow" some of the things from China without China politics. Regional concentration there is directly tied with their hukou system. No democratic government is able to implement that system without collapsing.

Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.

If India is 10 years behind China, that would mean in 2036 India will be where China is today. What's the chance of that happening?

Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.

I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.

The infrastructure spending is where and how the corruption happen. The cases of bridge collapses in bihar gujarat, the mp 90 degree bridge etc should be obvious cases of corruption.

Their communal system hasn't been relevant since the mid 80s when Deng Xiaoping got inspired by Thatcher and opened up the economy. The name remained, though.

> Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.

Yes, that sums it up. The biggest problem is government officials who get in the way of starting or running a business, ask for bribes, and generally make it impossible to do any non-software non-backoffice business work. Plus taxes.

The hukou system is nothing like that. It's an internal migration thing that works like moving to another country, you can gain "citizenship" of a different area and live there with full benefits.

It was also designed for a clear purpose (slowing down migration into cities that weren't ready to accept it) and was pretty successful, it just outlived its usefulness and became corrupt. Not the same as something based on ancient class divisions that was probably never that useful in the first place.

People work illegally because getting a stamp legally is hard if you don't have money or contacts in the local administration. Same reason as illegal immigrants anywhere else. The central government has been pushing to raise registration quotas and make the process easier but it's clearly not enough.

Well.. caste based discrimination is illegal. But caste based handouts are legal. So a reverse discrimination based on caste is legal and state supported. The only reason caste exists in 2026 is because there are state sponsored incentives if you belong to certain castes.

Sorry I mean condemned*

It can be complicated to draw a line between cultural elements worth preserving and crazy religious fantasy that needs to go. Indian caste system, IIUC, is deeply intertwined with their identity and ethics that it cannot be just cut out and removed. It is also partly coming from practical needs just like food related taboos of Middle Eastern religions that would need to be explained for its removal to be justified following the Chesterton's Fence principle.

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absolute OT trivia that I needed a place to drop: the Indian karma system do not consider beings outside of animal kingdom, e.g. a roadside tree, to be alive and directly involved in the karma and reincarnation and all that, and apparently so did not the original Indian Buddhism. It was originally Chinese, and more prominently Japanese, exposition and localization of Buddhism that changed it up to be the current Studio Ghibli form of it that yes mountains and rivers and 100 year old Italian combat biplanes can all be alive and sentient and that you just ate a carrot is a sort of your original sin and even strictest of vegetarianism is not guilt-free. Your LLM can elaborate on this if necessary...

Toxic Nationalism.

I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.

For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.

Could be because they're used to it. Every country has a caste system of some sort.

Nobody is defending caste system. Its bad, and its already illegal as it should be. People are just calling out the hypocrisy when its implied that this kind of stratification is unique to India and unheard of elsewhere. I mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.