Welcome to Fluther.
India is already far, far richer than it has ever been in its past.
Don’t make the common mistake of conflating money with wealth. Even a peasant farmer with no income, but who has even intermittent and unreliable electricity, paved roads nearby and availability of modern medicine is far, far richer than any maharajah of bygone days. India was never rich – as a nation (or collection of sort-of nations) – because it had a number of those minor potentates. The general population of India have historically been rather poor in terms of income and possessions, but this is improving.
By the metrics I mentioned – as well as the fact that taken as a whole, Indian society is making moves to a solid middle class – India is becoming richer every day. Which is not to say that there will be any lack of peasant farmers (or beggars) any time soon. As long as India continues on a path of liberalization – and if they learn to recognize and respect property rights far better than they do now – then the entire populace can benefit.
One of the problems that I have seen (second hand, but a close second hand) is that the peasant farmers in India – especially those on marginal farm land to begin with – cannot hold title to that land. It’s not that they can’t afford to buy land; there is no way for them to buy it and hold clear title to it. So when one of the major electric power generating companies wants land to build a power plant on – and land of marginal agricultural land is already pretty cheap, but they can get it for nothing by simply telling people to clear out – then there was never an incentive for the peasant who had been squatting on that land to have made any improvements in the first place. (This has also been a major problem for individual owners in many other parts of the world, not just India. This is a continuing problem throughout much of Africa, or so I’ve heard – since I haven’t been there and I haven’t read closely on it I don’t know that as well as I know of India’s problems in this regard.)
That’s going to be a problem anywhere, as it has been from time to time in the USA, too.
By the same token, and speaking of those power producers, India has a problem with pirated electricity that no other developed nation has: those rats’ nests of miscellaneous wires in major cities – all of them unauthorized, unsafe and piratical thefts of uncompensated electricity, and with next to no enforcement of norms of engineering, safety or ownership – means that there’s very little incentive for the producers to market their power to retail customers, either, because so much of it can be stolen with impunity.
But I’m sure the Indians will figure out all of this stuff eventually.