“I could see some parts of the coastal peninsula approaching Thai levels at best”
Some comments in our discussion threads necessitate a deconstruction of the Indian economy.
In my opinion, a good place to start analyzing national economies is nominal industrial output. This is a good measure of the level and depth of industrial prowess of a country. The prices of industrial goods also tend to be less sensitive to locale, than services.
As an example of the usefulness of this measure, consider the economies of Italy and Germany. Seeing the number of German brands around the world, the reputation of German engineering and more recently, the exodus of highly educated Italians from their country, we have a strong intuition that the German economy is stronger than the Italian one. Yet the difference between Germany and Italy in terms of overall PPP GDP per capita does not seem very large. However, restricting to the nominal industrial output, the German output is more than twice that of Italy.