I explicitly measured my words when I said “good” - india has a metric ton of engineers most employed in the WITCH consultant shops and none of them know any real programming. The median gets affected by it. A lot. Any decent engineer at the level GitHub would hire would get 40 lacs per annum INR the first year after graduation (very conservatively) which is $50k usd. Someone working at GitHub or any top tier startup or FAAnG after 4-6 years of experience would be making north of 100-150k usd.
Amazon pays 160k$ to freshers in US. It pays 25L aka 30k$ in India. SDE2 band in India is 65k$ to 100k$. SDE3 Gets 150k$ to 200k$.
Add to that the lax regulations of labor laws in India and Amazon paying top of the market, they get a skilled and an experienced worker in India for the same price as a 21 yr old US college grad.
India is still extremely cheap compared to the west.
I don’t know what to say man, you can keep insisting no one pays well in india, all I know are people making 1Cr+ with 6 years of experience in early thirties. Amazon doesn’t pay well anywhere tbh.
Government staff in india get ton of perks - cheap housing , very good pensions, healthcare for life and so on .
There is no easy way to cost this, that mission headline number is probably only the incremental mission specific expenses that got budgeted not the actual costs which are far higher if done via contractors (nasa) or private initiative (spaceX)
But the median quality you get it’s not the same. Basically because a good amount of the top engineers move out for better salaries. As the salaries get better in India, it’s easier to find good engineers, but then the salary difference is not that much.
They have a bias towards big tech (more big tech employees submit their TC), so you end up with higher numbers. The question is whether you get a similar bias in every country. You compare the same company in different locations to avoid this problem (easy to do with India, see my Apple example in another comment).