Interesting. It seems like a big culprit is high cost of living, which makes many jobs no longer worthwhile. Any ideas why it's so much higher in the US than in India? Is it due to landlords?
Their safety net is a job guarantee rather than the US's ragbag of free money programs (welfare, disability fraud [1], etc), so you don't get to enjoy a life of leisure under any circumstance. In the US, it's pretty easy to get free money and play video games all day.
Second, their regulatory structure doesn't destroy as many low skill jobs as ours does (e.g. in the US, a cigarette wala like Eric Garner gets executed, and the cops shut down many food trucks).
[1] NPR did an expose a while back on the massive levels of disability fraud in the US. Apparently it's now a shadow welfare system, significantly larger than actual welfare: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
For example, electric power consumption per capita is 765 kWh in India, 12,988 kWh in the USA. [1]