India is super super poor still I cannot imagine they would build out domestic Starlink for hypothetical wars before other actual critical infrastructure.
To launch a starlink style system, you need to be able to rapidly design and produce hundreds of thousands satellites and launch them within relatively short period of time with extremely high success rate. only the largest industrialized nation on earth can do that. india is 30-50 years away from such achievement.
To give you some quick ideas - for the total of 330 space launches in 2025, the US had almost 200, China had close to 100 launches, Russia had 17 launches, the rest of the world had the remaining 20 in total.
India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.
How many countries can claim the achievement of developing nuclear weapons? Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?
Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)
That only matters if you want to know how much an average individual can spend. Gross GDP is more relevant when you're discussing how much the state could spend on defence programs.
Yeah who knows poor infrastructure might let India skip fiber in some areas entirely. Maybe it’s not that hard to launch a domestic Starlink if Blue Origin/ SpaceX will bring your satellites up cheaply .