Sorry if that sounded like I was saying "primitive". I was not meaning to. The relevant fact is that it takes a lot of money, proportional to the size of the country, to have good environmental, health, and safety regulations, and enforce them. A very large country such as India, which does have many technologically savvy people, can have nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and a space program for far less money than it takes to make all your manufacturing not cut corners in E,H,&S regulations.

Which is neither here nor there for a country with 1+ billion people.

You can have all that and still have 70%+ piss poor population...

So does China, so did the Soviet Union, but it doesn't really mean they're not “poor”.