To understand this, we have to know how India failed in properly training/educating & instilling core democratic values for a whole generation. Here are some connected observations:

About two decades ago, rapid globalisation opened up the Indian market. The kids coming out of the education system were fluent in reading & written English (We can thank the Macaulay plan in late 1800s for that). The world was moving towards interconnectivity. The government gave its blessing by allowing setting up of thousands of IT training colleges to feed the global markets. It was seizing on the strengths of language & communication abilities vis-a-vis other Asian countries. By 2007-08, close to 200 engineering colleges were operating in each Indian state in addition to the state universities. This created a great boom for forex, rapid social mobility & better living standards as compared to the 80s.

In parallel, other educational disciplines however suffered greatly. If 10 million kids were seeking admission to IT & engineering as first preference, the not-so-fortunate ones were mostly left to seek out arts & commerce streams. Government-sponsored research remained laggard without any new scientific agency. IITs, the flagship of Indian tech education were diluted to accommodate more students, yet funding remained at best constant for IISc & TIFR, the flagship institutions of basic sciences. This was a shortsighted move. The IT wave should have created wealth that could be channeled to improve the education standards across the board & fund more research. Indian education system completely missed this memo - as a result of which Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand will eat their lunch in coming years. The IT education/training today itself has significant variance, which has lowered industry trust in their capabilities. The vagaries of oversupply [1]

India has created an army of IT professionals but not invested in making quality scientists or researchers. The ones who do, eventually seek greener pastures in developed countries. They will have to depend on R&D done in US/EU to serve their long term goals in the years to come. This is the exact model China observed and learned to avoid. They invested in research, lured back a lot of their talented researchers & computer scientists. They built up a industry with strong foundations. The current AI boom in Chinese economy is completely home-grown & self-sustained. As an expat it pains me to see this glaring miss.

In tandem, people have become increasingly frustrated with the rapid unsustainable urbanization (in cities such as Hyderabad & Bangalore). I disagree somewhat with other comments regarding governance: People are joining civil services out of a mission to change the status-quo. The young turks now are better than the generation before them. They are computer savvy, from educated households, less corrupt and more tolerant to class & caste divides. But the lumbering bureaucratic machinery is too slow to cater to rapidly changing socioeconomic definitions. A significant chunk of India's demographics is young working population. Opportunities to work in offshore IT position or meteoric salary growth reminiscent of dotcom-era are dwindling steadily. Discontents have given rise to social tensions & intolerance.

Added to that mix is the local politics which has polarized people on the basis of religion & indoctrinated them to some degree to be either be pro-Hindu or anti-Ruling party. Secularism is a dangerous and disbelieved term. Our society has missed teaching valuable traits of tolerance, fact-finding and fraternity to the people running the show.

It is a decade of missed opportunities

1. https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/talent-assessment/90-indian...