With all due respect, Indians don't travel on rooftop. They find old pictures of Indian railways or pictures from neighbouring countries where people are travelling on train rooftops and think it happens even today in India even though Indian railways is one of the world's largest electrified railway system (2nd largest after China I guess).
And we have bullet trains under construction, we recently trialled RRTS as well.
India has a huge metro rail system in all big cities and counting, total cities with operational and under construction metro rail system is 22 with 5 to 6 more cities about to have them under construction.
1200 km in ropeways in small towns and areas with difficult terrain
en.wikipedia.org
Has the most lucrative and fastest growing commercial office market in the world, with modern central business districts growing fast among various other things.
These are just 3 of the multiple Central Business Districts India has with many upcoming, India's Grade-A office market is 3rd largest in the world, while its near zero in rest of south asia for real.
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India also has more than a hundred unicorn startups while rest of south asia hardly has any.
There are some 530 companies in India with more than $1 billion market cap, rest of south asia barely has a dozen.
Whether you like it or not, Chandigarh's car sales annually is more than rest all countries in south asia, is more than half of Pakistan as well. And Chandigarh is a small Tier-2 city with just a million people and not the richest city in India.
With high economic growth India has achieved a lot and is achieving much more every year. Like we'll breach $1 trillion in exports mark next year when rest of south asia combined would barely be 10% of it.
India may not be as developed as China but it isn't as backward as rest of the sub-continent is, not many countries have been able to replicate China even in ASEAN. People might ridicule India for its dusty streets or unplanned towns and poverty etc but there are things beyond that too like the scale of 5G implementation and operationalisation while rest of south asia barely has 5G, or the digital payments revolution at unprecedented scale.
Although I understand the cartoon was trying to portray a contrast between China and India, India has done pretty well considering what it has went through all these years and will be fairly transformed by this decade. Even getting a few hours of electricity everyday in our cities used to be a luxury more than a decade ago, now we we complain if electricity goes for a few hours everyday even in villages. Things have indeed changed a lot and India is well on its way to reclaim past glory.
(Sorry for long post)
