India's wealth gap is absolutely jarring. There are beautiful fenced mansions with manicured lawns and just outside the fence homeless kids setting up fires for the night.
Very much not the same. In the United States sleeping on the street is associated with addiction and mental illness, or in teenagers with abuse. In India it is commonplace for high-functioning people to sleep on the streets on in illegally constructed shacks with no water or sanitation, for purely economic reasons.
There are a lot of articles published saying half of New Yorkers are a single paycheck away from homelessness, 60% of Americans are a single emergency expense from homelessness, etc., but every month lots of those people lose their jobs and have emergency expenses, and they aren't flooding onto the street or into emergency shelters. Those alarming-sounding numbers come with really important caveats like "without relying on family" and "without relying on friends" or even "without going into debt." Having access to those resources is a really important aspect of social class. Even the people shitting in the sidewalk in San Francisco, a lot of them have friends and family who have money and would love to help them if they could figure out how. The difference when you're homeless in India is that everybody you know is either in the same circumstances as you or knows so many people who are that it doesn't make sense to single you out for help.
There is a safety net here, if for example you get homeless after working or are disabled. There is no such thing in India. Sure you can have an employee contributed benefits plan(if you are lucky to have one of those employers). If you became poor after 20 years of working you are in the same boat as some poor kid teen who was born on the street.
That's a mental health issue in the US. Every city has shelters, food kitchens, etc so if you are mentally stable, clean of drugs, and not too proud to take charity you don't need to be on the streets for long.
Where the US system fails is with mentally unstable people and drug addicts. This is nowhere near the same thing as an entire lower class of 10s of millions willing to work that are still homeless.
Places like India have a much wider spectrum of extremes between incredible poverty and incredible wealth. North America has a subset of that spectrum.
If you don't believe this, I challenge you to drop yourself into 0-star in any place like India and see how it stretches you.
