Salaries are 1/4th - but you also don't have as high of pension / payroll costs as in US.

At l3 & l4 - when you factor in benefits (including health care costs), 401k matching, payroll taxes - it's probably 1/5th or less.

Pay in India is variable. They have a lot of great engineers who make good money - not what they would in the US, but the difference is not that much. They also have a lot of "engineers" who shouldn't be engineers doing the simplest tasks who may 10x less than they would in the US. If you just need a simple web app that is just like every other web app except with your logo you don't need the great engineers.

Google L3 SWE in BLR: 36k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4bb28696-b3a9-430e-af6b-87e139b...

Google L4 SWE in BLR: 64k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/3631ce80-f5fa-41e3-bd22-192a98a...

Google L3 SWE in Bay Area: 236k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/8cb64099-ffcf-437f-baa3-a88ae7d...

Google L4 SWE in Bay Area: 260k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4468e21b-6650-4e6c-948b-e90ea1d...

That's a difference between 4x and 6.5x

I think that your 3x difference is definitely a lower bound, and it'll be closer to 6.5x than to 3x or 4x most of the time (though I don't see aggregated data per-company, per-region in levels.fyi (but I didn't bother logging in)