Can you point me to atleast one "active" group out there ? http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news, check out the post frequency, member size etc.
The use cases you mention are very few and can be easily addressed with HN tags. Example : "HN India : Fundraising event in Bangalore ?" or "HN India : Let's have a meetup in Mumbai." If it's interesting to indian HNers they will upvote it and follow it up.
Realize, that starting a group is easy, building a tribe around it is not. There are many things that made people come to HN, Paul Graham, Ycombinator, Startup School, a custom and simple software. Good content came later.