India is huge country. Huge, I mean so huge that it will be difficult to truly explain the diversity we have here. It will be easy for a German to explain what Germany is, Or French to explain what France is and so on. But it will be very difficult for an Indian to explain what India is in totality basically because there are thousands of cultures, ways of lives, languages, people of ethnic origin, color, language, religion and so on and so forth. In fact any form of classification that you can come up to we have diverse categories in that.
This is not true for China. Or Korea or Thailand. Because they are a single ethnic group. People who talk of deficiencies or things not being a part of Indian culture do not understand Indian culture.
In India you will see large metropolitan cities acting as hubs for employment, living and opportunities. Go to villages you see poverty you also see prosperity(Depending on where you go). You will see most advanced technologies to old stone age agriculture methods. At one end you will see farmers in the area of Punjab being the richest of the lot and you will also see farmers committing suicide due to debt and poverty.
You will see people eating stomach full to people barely affording a meal a day.
Amidst all this we have a thriving industry in every domain of business you can imagine. We have the best colleges and universities and we also have a huge problem of illiteracy.
We write software, we have a nuclear weapons program, despite being the worlds most peaceful nation we have one of the largest armies in the world. We have a space program. Yet at the same time we struggle to feed our self.
Our society still has the stains of socialism and communism from the old days. We still have massive corruption and inefficiency in government layers.
Amidst all this parents feels their kids are better off studying and getting good jobs to make a living than doing something like sports which don't offer much incentive to make a comfortable living. There are instances of gold medal winners pawn broking their medals to afford a day's meal.
Also there are not many facilities and training options if you want to be a serious athlete. At the same time we don't believe China kind of policies either.