G-Man wrote
India invested heavily into education and they are reaping the rewards. I dont know how true it is but I have heard that most people just have degrees coming out of their ears and still work in places like call centres. Heavy population though, a 6th of the planet lives in one country O.o
The competition to get into decent universities is unbelievably fierce in India (which hopefully does not lead to the same plague of cheating and plagiarism that haunts the Chinese higher education system, but who knows). But it must be born in mind that it also has a vast peasant population - most of it undereducated and impoverished. So not everyone's getting this education.
There are a lot of people in India. That's for sure. I had this crazy experience of crossing the border into Nepal on foot - and literally within 500m the crowds thinned out and I was on a street with only one or two people on it for the first time in a week. Also, the Nepali teenagers were all dressed like teenagers everwhere, rock 'n roll t-shirts, torn jeans, while 500m behind the rather dated looking Indian teen fashions were in full swing. It was like passing through a magic portal between two worlds.
One of the things with the salaries though is that the cost of living in India is very cheap compared to here. So while it's true that in real terms Indians get paid less for the same jobs, it's not as big a gap as the salary figures alone suggest.
edit: And of course, some of us benefit from the same thing. We frequently don't get the kinds of salaries that Americans are paid with the same jobs and the same skills. But that's kinda ok because our expenses are less (just thinking about higher education costs which are cripplingly expensive in the USA). My girlfriend works in the film industry which definitely benefits from charging lower rates than the unionised US workforce. But of course, local producers keep pushing crew salaries down to take a bigger piece of the pie themselves - all the while arguing that they need to do so to attract more business. So there's a lot of exploitation in it too.
