India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

Let's not get carried away. The rest of the world doesn't want to use their things due to a combination of (a) not knowing about the things; and (b) the things being in Chinese.

Germany(Which was highly developed nation even before WW2) and Korea, were split to become proxies for USSR and US. A move in which people lost a more than they gained. We opted to be non allied. The magic is not capitalism. The magic is in being a proxy state to a super power(The very thing we gained independence from).

>>1990s onwards we have made our lives so much better, and the shit didn't have to be so bad for our forefathers and parents.

You are looking at the results, without looking at the ingredients and ecosystem required to produce those results. Capitalism doesn't work the way you think. There is no magical wand, or a policy incantation that can fix things without supporting infrastructure and ecosystem. There is no way, no magical mantra to pull out thousands of non existent engineers/doctors/skilled professionals out of the nothing in 1947, in an country where 95% were farmers, and the remainder in non productive jobs. There is also no way without this absent workforce and non existent money for you to build hundreds of industries and businesses. In a non existent government institution to collect taxes, and then build road and other supporting infrastructure. Even the US after all these years heavily relies on skilled professionals from foreign countries coming to their country and builds the ecosystem for them to immigrate, and those skilled professional go there because they are constantly building those infrastructure to support it.

You are inheriting a country, which doesn't have a proper working administration. Let alone institutions to collect taxes, or plan economies at scale. Nor do you have access to skilled talent, or ecosystem or infrastructure to build industries.

Yet despite all this we have crawled our way out.

The only reason why you see the free market reforms in 92 even worked is because, there was an industrial base in South India, and there were engineering colleges that had been developed over time, producing engineers and industries, which can now be scaled to a larger economy.

>>All Indians do is give excuses for why India was poor, but nearly all their excuses can be best represented by the biggest excuse of them all 'Hindu rate of growth'.

Or somebody like you should show us, how one could actually create stuff out of literal nothing.

That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around. There's no evidence that Free Basics actually brought a significant number of new people on the internet (the rate of people cited as joining Free Basics is comparable to the rate of people joining the internet in general, so it didn't change anything)

Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India. The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.

Truly so, We didn't have the great famine like China(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) where close to 45 million people died. We didn't remain like Bangladesh, which is still a peasant economy. Nor do we have internal troubles that Pakistan has currently. We have refused to be proxy states to USSR and USA. And we are quite progressive economically. True we haven't eradicated poverty and hunger yet, but neither has any country of our scale.

>>But under the auspicious of Nehru and then under Indira Gandhi, India aped Soviet style planning and top down approach for a country that is a "natural confederation"

Why wouldn't they copy USSR? It was a economic model that is paying off Russia till date. Russia went from a peasant state, under Tsar's control to becoming a unchallenged super power in half a century. Heck there is no absolute free market anywhere, the only question is to what extent do you allow it. Even countries like US, have a central planning where they decide budgets.

>>RD Tata was correct, if you want to read the counter vision to Nehru, read up on JRD Tata. He was proponent for free market capitalism, which would have had far better results.

If I were the Prime minister of a new independent nation, with no sizable skilled population, and a agrarian peasant ecomony. My priorities would be way different. I would be looking at how I can build the next generation engineering colleges(IIT's), management colleges(IIM's), the best administrative cadre(IAS), I would be looking at building irrigation infrastructure for farm lands to end drought and famine(Dams and reservoirs), I would be looking at energy generation(Power plants, hydel power), I would looking at bringing internal peace and harmony(Police force), I would looking at building in-house skilled labour(Government polytechnics), manufacturing capabilties among my fellow citizens(ITI, BEL, BHEL), my own defence manufacturing, research and developement(HAL, DRDO, ADE etc), I would looking at building my future space program(ISRO), my own nuclear program. All this in a hostile neighbourhood. Without any of these, simply thinking that a smal policy change is over simplification of a very complicated problem.

This is how governments think. Priorities of a business family would be way lower on my list.

Nehru has already done more nation/institution building work, than any Prime minister will ever do.

>>counter examples for not following Nehruvian Socialism, makes me feel that intellectually we are in two completely different dimensions.

No, we are in the same boat. I support hard core free market capitalism. But a child needs to crawl first before it can think of running or beating Usain Bolt.

You can't build a F-16, when you don't even know/have skills to repair a bicycle.