your observations are accurate, but the analysis misses out on the _biggest_ problem with india.

population.

the pollution, the crumbling infrastructure, and the rampant corruption, all persist and worsen not because indians don't care and are too conservative, but because all past attempts at trying to solve these problems has always been stymied by the ever growing population in the country.

basic economics teaches us that when something is in extremely high supply, its demand (and value) goes down. the same is true with human life.

when there are too many people, there are plenty desperate enough to tolerate almost any crap. this lends itself to easy exploitation, and the maintenance of lower classes working in sub-human conditions. collective action also becomes a joke---there is always someone ready to do a job at existing conditions even if 10s of millions "organize" to protest for better working conditions (that's the "advantage" of having a 1000million pool to choose from, a 10million here or a 10million there just does not matter).

when a business has an almost unlimited supply of customers, treating any one of them with care and respect no longer matters---the business does not risk losing anything because there is always another "customer" ready to take the place of anyone irate enough to leave.

the same thing applies to government. why put any effort into serving someone with honesty and decency when there are hundreds of others waiting to get ahead in line (and willing to pay for that privilege). pretty soon, you come to expect the bribe as a birthright.

any policing of crime or corruption cannot even begin to make a start because the problem is so huge. everyone who has taken on the system has died sad and broken and unsuccessful.

finally, politicians see a warm body as a potential vote. it is to their advantage to have plenty of ignorant, uneducated, "voters" to turn out for elections every few years. there is no national political will to give serious consideration to addressing the population problem.

there are only 2 ways to even begin to solve india's problems:

(1) reduce the population of the country to less than 10% of what it currently is (less than 100million people). when human life becomes scare, it will be valued more. the easy availability of a "slave" body will no longer be something that is taken for granted.

once that happens, all that talk about culture and conservatism will go down the crap-chutes.

my feeling is that nature will soon take its course, and rampant epidemics (combined with pollution and bad infrastructure) will do the job of wiping out large swaths of the population in a few years.

the only interesting thing is what happens after that.

(2) an authoritarian regime like that in china---when you have the ability to wipe off human excrement with the same ease as you might wipe off crap, you bring the populace into some semblance of coordinated behavior.

when the price of corruption is "off with your head", the putatively corrupt might atleast think twice before trying to give vent to their corruption.

china also does not have to worry about "votes" and "voters". the tendency to see an extra warm body as a pawn in electoral politics is absent, and that leaves the authorities with a clearer idea of all of the disadvantages to having a massive population without the distortion of (re)election.

this authoritarian (or benevolent dictator) "solution" may not work, and here, the culture and conservativism of the country may play a role.

i am just waiting for the epidemics. if the aids virus mutates to a form that can be spread by mosquito bites (and why not, a proboscis isn't really all that different from a shared needle), it is goodbye india.