Most folks only have two concepts of India. One is that they “control” the help desk world of American companies and the other is that they own most of the medium priced hotels across America.
India is a complex country. Back in the days of the Cold War, they had the largest collection of PhDs in the world, just behind the US and the Soviet Union. They designed some really good ships, submarines and other military equipment. Their challenge wasn’t at the top. They had the smart folks. What they didn’t have was a clever work force. They could design it, but they couldn’t build it.
They have evolved. They launched 104 satellites from a single rocket. The old record was 39. Good news for India. Sadly, 96 of them were ours. I guess when we outsourced NASA that included putting satellites in orbit too.
As an aside, Nasa’s Maven Mars mission cost us $671 million. India sent an unmanned rocket to orbit Mars for $73 million. Read more here.