You have basically three Indias, stratified by money, and money only.
1/2 total population: extremely poor. That’s 500 million ppl. They squeak by somehow. Of that figure, some percentage (not really sure, I’m guessing maybe 15-20% or 75-100million ppl) are DIRT POOR. They don’t eat everyday. They may spend their entire lives browsing the public dumps for food and anything they can use at home or possibly resale.
That’s a staggering number, and more poverty than China. You may think Democracy and capitalism work better than communism and capitalism, but the experiment has already been done in India and China, and India (democracy) has lost. Capitalism will not do anything to change the poverty of these 500 million people. Why? It is not designed to, that’s why, and that is a pretty basic failure when it comes to a model on which to base an entire society.
About 450 million lower-, middle-, and upper-middle class. Yes they do the IT jobs and the service jobs (Hello, this is Krish, may I help you?) and the engineering jobs. There’s also a class that produces the arts (classical music and dance, and of course, all things Bollywood). They are not as wealthy as the tech and engineering billionaires, but they don’t have to be because those billionaires are their patrons.
Then there’s the superrich. They do what superrich people everywhere do, and are in fact better thought of as members of the global superrich society.
Yes, the caste system still exists, but in the final analysis, it’s the money that determines status.
But my point is, these are three totally different societies, even though they are all comprised of Indian people. I’d be very careful about lumping them together. My musician friends and associates are as far away from the impoverished India as I am sitting here in Seattle. In fact, they are closer to me culturally than they are to India’s poor.