As a US-raised Indian I'm not familiar with the macro details. But I've been living in India for the past few years working for a startup, so let me identify some low-hanging fruit. 1) Incredibly, shockingly poor hygiene. Dirty black rags being used repeatedly to dry plates at restaurants. Idlys being cooked on plastic sheets inside hot streamers. Infernoes of uncollected trash burning on streets. Rats and cockroache…
Well we don't have any other options. We need to work, or we will be wiped out. You have no clue, what a person can do- or how hard he can work when he is faced with a such a situation in life. I've personally been there, and I can tell you throughout my teens I've had situations where it was doing good in the next exams or going back to poverty.
When you go through that, you don't complain of lack of sleep or rest, you don't complain you just have a pair or clothes, or that your home is just a room where the whole family sleep packed and you get one small little corner where you need to your studies under a dim bulb to compete with a million people.
You just realize you have no other option, you work, work and work until success becomes inevitable- indifferent to the circumstances. That is something like a small glimpse of what I and some of friends went through to get where we are today.
Not sure if teens in US go through the same thing. But sometimes when I hear about the pain US citizens talk of when IT outsourcing is mentioned, those are not easy chances we are getting. For many of us, those have come after going through toughest situations you can probably can't even imagine.