[paxunix]

Some time ago I had asked one of my Indian friends (who manages a software team in India and the US and has travelled the world, so he has a varied perspective) what he thinks is the biggest barrier to India's advancement? He said "Corruption. The bureaucracy and the government have so much corruption at so many levels". This sounds like a different way to state your mention of "management failures". Hopefully the additional worldwide scrutiny is a motivator for change.

[blueblisters]

“Corruption” is an easy scapegoat because it allows the electorate to believe that a new, clean and strong politician can solve all their problems. The reality is combination of low civic sense (why litter in the first place?), under-resourced enforcement (who is going to stop me from littering?), limited funding for infrastructure because of a lack of independent revenue sources available to city administrations, and bad policy that makes city administration effectively a puppet of the state (provincial) governments. In all this, corruption plays a role in making a bad situation worse.

[dartharva]

Couldn't have put it better

[z9znz]

I wanted to say corruption, because that's usually a simple root cause of many such failures... whether it's corruption because of nepotism or graft or just pure theft, the result is delivering something far less than should have been achievable.

However, on the global corruption scale, India is "not so bad". Even so, "not so bad" when applied to a billion+ people is bad.