Putting aside the absurd comparison of living costs in a 3rd world country vs 1st world...
India is filled with a ton of misery. It's the only country in the world where I saw dead people just lying in the gutter. The Mumbai slum was one of the worst places I've ever been and you want to hold that up as some sort of ideal? That people should just live down to that level instead of striving for better? If it wasn't for the Indian government welfare programs, that slum would be filled with rotting corpses.