So basically, just like the U.S.?
Despite all that I believe India has moved in the right direction in the last 20 years. I couldn't imagine how it would have been if not for the reforms of the nineties, which I personally believe has benefited all. Yes the rich have gotten richer but the opportunities that didn't exist before do now for the middle class and the poor. People don't have to depend on the government to provide jobs.
Its good to remember that what stands today, is what was left after being opened up to the big bad world without any assistance. India has built its entire tech base, and IT ability from scratch.
Something I've noticed - when someone says "just like the US" about a nation like India, they've almost certainly never left the US. At most, they've been to the EU, and often think Mexico is the depths of poverty).
Edit:
The poor manage to survive quite nicely, and most of them don't work at all
Do you mean Lucky Duckies: http://www.gocomics.com/features/search/Lucky%20Ducky
Smug comics which preach to the choir are great, but I like statistics more. Here are statistics on the work habits of the US poor (about 1 in 4 poor people works): http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
Here are statistics showing that the poor consume about 2-3x what they produce: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt
(In India, obviously the stats look nothing like this.)
Anyway, obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/386/
Speaking for myself, most government workers do something that's more valuable to society than what I do for a lot less money. That probably holds true for 90% of the HN readership, although I suppose YMMV for the societal contribution of serving ads and flipping bits vs administrating social security.
And it is also true for many other countries, with a mostly poor population. All over the world, one of the big benefits of wealth is the ability to build your own "island" or castle.
But here's an interesting question. If we force everyone with wealth and power to live like the masses, then the only way to improve their lot would be to improve all of society or emigrate. Would we then see a much stronger push against corruption and bad economic policy?
This is obviously a purely intellectual exercise for fun. Some people believe that at some point a country's oligarchy will try to improve things for everyone at least a little bit. This is a very naive view of wealth and power in a chaotic country.
The only ones who can, and some times do, push for reform are the masses. But mobilized masses have short attention spans and can never push for important details. The details remain the devil's domain. This is why masses can get rid of dictators, but everything after the dictator is a painfully slow grind of minuscule improvements.
I believe a slow grind of minuscule improvements describes India's past 50 or so years quite well. Things are improving, just not nearly enough within any one human life time.
I think this is called comunism (as Marx intended, not as was executed in the USSR, Cuba, and any other place in practice).
The problem with this is that if you don't allow for the existence of official channels the rich can use to improve their lot then there is no point in being rich, so most people will either not bother and work as little as they can to live or find unofficial channels where they can have power to improve their lives (see the communist parties in the former USSR and China).
Of course, communism can arguably work, but how to do so is still an open problem.
I think communism is chiefly defined by public ownership.
What I propose is an obviously crazy impractical outlawing of owning big houses with much better then average infrastructure. It would still be perfectly legal to have tons of money and lobby your politicians hard. So think of it as law against big, fancy houses, and gated communities.