The biggest reason for India's extreme poverty is that 50% of people are engaged in agriculture or related fields but this sector contributes only 17% to the GDP. A vast majority of these farmers are subsistence farmer. They own tiny tracts of land which gets further subdivided after each generation. So until India can do urbanization at the same scale as China, there is no hope. And this gets complicated because of archaic land-acquisition laws and the all emotional drama associated with taking land away from poor peasants.