Much of India is at the same stage as England before the Romans came. Many Indian farmers still use wooden plows pulled by oxen. Landholdings are small, little larger than the fields outlined by stone walls, remnants of the Stone and Iron Ages, still visible in the British countryside.
Many Indians still make a living with primitive occupations. Wheelwrights continue to make wooden wheels. Farmers plant one seed at a time. One or two metal pots and pans are the only modern possessions of many families. Visiting India is, except for the railroads, like going to Britain or Ireland in the year One.
The rich prey upon the poor. Moneylenders end up with more and more land by forcing cash-starved farmers into pledging their assets and driving them into bankruptcy.
The hundreds of millions of people locked into early technologies and occupations make the modernization, centralization, and automation of India very difficult.
Many in each segment of Indian society are taught to hate and despise other divisions, rather than encouraged to love their neighbors. As a result, the peoples and castes have a harder time working together. They are more divided than were the separate Celtic tribes (to whom many are related) in early Europe.
Europe zoomed ahead because, after the first and second centuries, it moved toward a common religion that commanded both rich and poor to love their neighbors. Many obeyed. Their adoption of Catholicism was made easier by Caesar’s earlier destruction and centralization of many small political entities.
That did not happen in India. The Apostle Thomas did go there after the Resurrection, assigned to tell the easternmost of Abraham’s descendants about The Programmer, Program, and Holy Wireless Connector. But, intra-country hostility was too great to make much headway and no Caesar had combined the many kingdoms into one, which made the other Apostles’ work easier to accomplish in the westerly mission fields.
The most modern sections of India’s economy are involved with computers. As the Indian people make the leap from that unifying intellectual technology to understanding about The Programmer, Program, and Holy Wireless Connector, many more souls will know the joy of One God, one Heaven, and one Kingdom in this world and the next.