My point is more on general development, if you want to speed run wealth, capital, expertise, skill accumulation, it's safety 10th, you throw as many bodies into as many industries as you can and start building industrial/talent base. The output of throwing the entire bellcurve will be a lot of garbage, especially if only top 1% is "adequate" quality by western standards, but if you're a large country with population scale, you can generate enough 1% to to significantly drive/snowball higher value development. India has a space program while smaller richer countries don't because they've got enough surplus talent to pursue one. In the the meantime, that other 99% of bad to medicore goods, the factory fires, the collapsed buildings will become a historic footnote even a generation later. Chinese citizens with 40x more income, all the meat they can eat, air conditioners, cars etc aren't thinking about Foxconn suicide nets from 10 years ago. The TLDR for me is chabuduo, or close enough quality / effort applied at scale (if one has it and India does) is very powerful.

But as expat who lived in PRC and been to India, I know what you mean. Every country, especially larger ones will have enough elites and market for high quality services. Sometimes there's even premium vs west, i.e. PRC in the 90s, you want best western stuff, chances are there's big tariff or extra transaction fees from smuggling. Services especially, experts/expats who offer their rare skills in developing countries will charge premium if anything. And somethings you simply can't get, i.e. wealthy South East Asians going to Singapore for top tier private medical treatment because they don't have enough rich elites to support a tier1 private hospital at home. I know Canadian (with universal coverage) diasphora who wanted to retire like king in SEA but realized they need a few 100k sitting around in case of medical crisis. Then more country develops the more market for high quality goods/services and price start coming down due to more competition addressing the market. Like there's tier3 Chinese cities where you can live like king and still have decent access to high quality goods and services.