It's hard to be sympathetic when walking through Paharganj in Delhi and have hundreds of con artists just outright lying and trying to scam well meaning tourists. I won't go back to India because of it. It's one thing to pay a guy to take pictures of you at Taj, it's another to have someone be helpful then demand a tip for it.
China has a billion people too, but life there is far less horrid, dirty and bureaucratic. While the Chinese government is pretty deplorable, something is going right there, compared to India. Another problem with India is the mind-numbing Colonial-era bureaucracy -- to start a small business in India it takes months of paperwork just to get a business license. You have to get papers signed, resigned, rubber stamped by ten different offices and then pay crazy expensive bribes to everyone along the way. The problem is the government. It's an obsession with administivia at the expense of entrepreneurs.