Definitely agree, for a country with close to 2B population, it is absurd how their education system is divided into "a couple exceptional schools and the rest are really bad"
As an Indian who didn't make it into the IITs (and instead attended a different school)"The rest are really bad" isn't entirely accurate:
- Facilities aren't that much worse than the IITs
- Student quality varies - there's smart/motivated and dumb/demotivated/burnt-out kids - unlike the IITs that has a much higher quality bar - but you have both kinds
- Faculty is the real difference.. since faculty in India (esp Engineering) isn't geared to research the quality can really vary wildly
- Basically - if you're great at what you do - academics isn't a great track in India unlike the US