Combined with this, India inherited a dysfunctional governmental bureaucracy and law and order system which was aimed at preserving British control over India and not really do the actual job of governing the country. The founders did the best they could, and copied a bunch of seemingly good ideas from a bunch of western economies. This failed miserably because they overlooked the fact that western economies were fuelled by slavery, colonization, reckless industrialization and exploitation of natural resources. India doesn't have the natural resources like the US because there isn't any land left to be stolen. Exploiting colonial resources like the European powers is also out of the question. Bonded labourers etc. were (are?) present to some extent, but large-scale disenfranchisement and exploitation of entire demographics similar to the model used by westerners fifty or so years ago is not really tenable in today's world.

The point is, it's now obvious that the western model was bound to fail, but unfortunately this wasn't obvious back in the 50s. It's only now that India is making visible progress towards the goal of development, but this is largely because of the ground work laid in the last 50 or so years in raising levels of education and healthcare (which of course still have quite a long way to improve) to a reasonable baseline.

I don't think @sreeni_ananth's comment was discounting the role of colonialism, but rather looking at the way out. There's not much we can do now about what was done to India in the past (except maybe harboring ill will against 'the west'?). But looking to India's future, I'd have agree with him that the main issue standing in the path of India's full recovery and health is corruption.

A lot of governmental bureaucracy and the mechanisms for implementing law and order was cloned from the British not the west and the "redesign" that Nehru, Ambedkar and friends attempted, tried to borrow ideas from the US and Soviets without any real success. Just one example of the inherited system failing miserably is the judicial system which is a clusterfuck today purely because it simply doesn't scale. India has 1 judge per 100,000 people, while the US has something like 1 per 1000 while Sweden has 4 per thousand. Why is this? Partly economics and partly because the British weren't really interested in a working judiciary. They wanted a kangaroo courts to put dissidents into jail, not enforce law and order.

In retrospect, the ideal solution would have been to legitimize, educate and train the native law enforcement mechanisms like the panchayats. But again, this didn't happen because the (a) the british weren't interested in solving this problem and (b) Indians were enamoured with copying the west.

> But you're also saying the government laid the groundwork over 50 years

Yes it did and not because they had any brilliant ideas or execution here. Far from it. But instead, for the first time in about 200 odd years somebody actually tried to do what was good for the Indians instead of bleeding the country dry.

> There's not much we can do now about what was done to India in the past except maybe harboring ill will against 'the west'?

This is a mistaken notion. I'm reminded of Obama quoting Faulkner, "the past isn't dead and buried and in fact it isn't even past." That's very much true today and it's important to point out that western riches weren't gained by brilliant ideas but were simply stolen at the cost of great human suffering in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.

The least we can do now is campaign for free immigration. If westerners really think all humans are equal, they shouldn't discriminate for jobs based on imaginary lines in the ground. Of course, they don't really think so and they want to preserve their stolen wealth so they won't agree to this but we mustn't be afraid to point out their hypocrisy here.

> I'd have agree with him that the main issue standing in the path of India's full recovery and health is corruption.

You're very very very mistaken. I suspect you come from a privileged middle-class background and think of the bribes you have to pay in government offices as problems that India needs to solve. Even if all corruption stopped instantly today - what would that actually achieve? Do you think the 40% of the country that's living without toilets would get access to them? And more importantly, do you they think would start using these toilets if they had access to them? There are toilets being used as godowns in various places across the country. Think about why this is. Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths? Do you think the millions of students learning from incompetent teachers would suddenly get better teaching? Would they even get better facilities? Do you think electric plants would magically appear and solve the power crises across the country?

None of the above would happen. Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetence. Incompetence is the real problem in India, and that's mainly because of a poor education system. That in turn is because you can't start from 300 million people who couldn't read/write 60 years ago and somehow magically produce the hundreds of millions of people in a highly trained and educated workforce, which is what India needs today to solve its challenges.

So what you are saying is that everything that Mr Kejriwal, Mr Hazare and others are struggling for is ultimately meaningless -- they are not solving any significant issues by tackling corruption.

Here's another way of looking at it: Let's assume some brilliant person (like you, perhaps?) is able to come up with a solution that solves all the problems that you describe -- food production, sanitation, power plants etc "magically" appear to meet the needs of the poor. How long do you think it will last? Corrupt politicians will again begin to meddle and take advantage and in 10 years, we would be back to the "clusterfuck" stage, as you so colorfully describe it.

>I suspect you come from a privileged middle-class background

I come from a lower-caste background, if you need to know. And don’t worry, we are not likely to let anyone bury the past and forget either colonialism or casteism. Or are you forgetting that India's past riches were also obtained through caste-based oppression? I suspect you have nothing better to say than “Everything is broken, it’s all the fault of the British and so I want free immigration”.

You know, your opinions are beginning to convince me that maybe you are right, incompetence is a far bigger problem than corruption ;)

    Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths? 

   Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetence

Corruption contributes, but you're utterly clueless if you think all inefficiency will go away with corruption. For starters transportation infrastructure is poor, fuel is much too costly, people don't have the facilities to cook. Just throwing rice at kids won't work. You need vegetables, you need clean water, you need stoves. All of this is just not there. If you'd been to a village you would know people still cook using firewood and a three thousand year old stove design, they don't have easy access to drinking water, they're utterly dependent on self-grown vegetables. They don't have refrigeration or electricity. Fixing all this will cost serious money on top of organizational and logistical skills which simply aren't there at the scale that is required.

There are states like kerala where all of the above problems have been solved in past.

Bullshit. Did you even try a google search for malnutrition in Kerala before making this claim? Kerala is better than other Indian states for sure, but it's nowhere near the levels of a developed country. The communist government and associated land reforms have a lot more do with Kerala's successes than "reduced tolerance for corruption". Which isn't to say Kerala is less corrupt than the other states, it's just that you have the causation the wrong way.