As an Indian, I felt a real contrast when visiting Singapore. Everywhere we went around it was clean and beautiful but Little India. There was noise, trash, and what not. That walk was really insightful about us, begged questioning my values.
Many Indians in Singapore occupy higher social classes, similar to Indians in America (from what I was told by an American-educated Singaporean friend). But Little India is where a different sort of Indian lives - the cheap, expendable, poorly treated laborer. In fact, there were riots there under a year back because such laborers were being treated so poorly, that caused many Singaporeans to reflect on how they were treating these people (from what I was told).
Did you visit the residential heartlands? It can be dirty there too, just in more of a Chinese way. A friend of mine works in the Singaporean police, and cited a number of recurring embarrassing incidents in these neighborhoods that are symptomatic of poverty elsewhere.
tl;dr: Little India isn't "Indian", it's just "poor".