This is ridiculous. If Malaysia is on the verge of surpassing Portugal in per capita GDP why can’t India? They’re each “deeply colonial states”, neither of them having any real connection to pre-British states except as constituent units. More generally India has already done plenty to help its citizens. Even before the end of the License Raj, when the wannabe Fabians we’re running India you had massive improvements in health and education. Since the worst of the economic mismanagement was removed the Indian economy and the general populace's living standards have just shot up and continue to do so.
Your statement on Malaysia and Portugal GDP per capita surprised me. So I did some fact checking. According to Wiki Malaysia’s 2018 GDP per capita is usd 10,941. Portugal is 23,176. [1]
How many MacBook Pros do you get though. If anything, what the software developers might want is likely more expensive in Malaysia than Portugal. Likewise for India.
Then go define your software developer purchasing power parity index.
Such economic measures are complex, and if you want to see a single number for a country, that number should be representative for everything and everyone
China did it, Korea did it, all the Asian tigers did it, (The USA too, long ago) and via the same way: domestic government investment and programs to stimulate manufacturing.
You vastly underestimate the size and diversity of India.
Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU.
The can have a low rate on pretty much every statistic, while still having a higher total amount of it than us, simply due to.the sheer size of people. They could have an entire state, more modern, rich and with more people than Germany, while keeping their current statistics. No problem.
Also: Are you Indian (I think not), or what is your basis for the ”rootless“ statement. To us Germans, Americans appear rootless. But we are not competent to judge that!
Finally, things like this right here ARE how you get Indians out of poverty and illiteracy! Even if just via the resulting businesses lobbying for more education.
It's obviously not an exact science, since "middle class" has as much to do with how people define their own social status as it has to do with their actual income. But those measures counting hundreds of millions of Indians as middle class are doing that by including people surviving on a few dollars a day. Maybe in an Indian context where poverty is widespread this is considered middle class, but it's quite misleading to present that as middle class to a Western audience.
That is not the claim that was being made though. The one I replied to said India's middle class was bigger than the American and European ones. Being comparable to country with 5% of India's population basically just underlines the fact that India's middle class is tiny.
Yup, that Delhi-Lucknow Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb is deeply rootless. I’m sure Mamta didi et al and the by now Bengali minority in Kolkata are happy you’re dubbing them as deeply rootless.
