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by chakde 5547 days ago
Answer: Probabaly higher than yours because only only low class people ask crass questions.

Here's the book to actually understand India:- "Late victorian holocausts and the making of the third world". http://www.amazon.com/Late-Victorian-Holocausts-Famines-Maki...

As Nehru and others had observed, poverty in India is highly correlated with the length of British rule in that part of India, Bengal being the poorest and Punjab the richest. This is actually true of the world in general - compare Africa with Japan - prosperity is highly correleted with the colonial experience a country had.

Caste is almost irrelevant - the Gini coefficient which measures inequality is much higher in the US than in India.

India which was 25% of the world's economy in 1800 was essentially crushed by the British to make way for their industrialization via a captive market. Internal trade in India was crushed by internal tariffs. Railroads which had a positive network effect in the US, had the opposite (destructive) network effect in India killing its manufacturing base and driving millions to unemployment and dependance on agricultural land which lead to the widespread poverty you see today.

2 comments

One of the most corruption nations in the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India

836 million people live on 20 rupees a day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India

Pakistan is a better nation to do business than India & China http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/

Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...

Economic mobility != Social mobility

You are probably a low class person.