The money used on these programmes doesn't burn up, it gets recirculated. As an Indian I consider this a pretty good use of tax payer money.

It's a common perspective. My personal experience (working in the defense sector) is that these kinds of endeavors end up tieing up a lot of very smart doing vanity projects that in effect don't "generate value" for society. All the people involved wouldn't just be sitting on their hands if the moon project didn't exist. But I guess it could be worse.. they could be working on moving money around or pushing ads on to people

Technically no one has landed in the crater ridden South pole on the dark side of the moon. Scientifically it's useful to course these uncharted parts of the moon both for water/ice and mineral composition.

I don't see how poverty comes into play here: every nation had similar issues when they were doing space exploration. They are two unrelated spheres. Solving one doesn't mean the other won't be

What typical engineering course covers the design of reliable systems which work mostly autonomously in environments with huge temperature variations, vacuum, inaccessibility for repair, significant radiation, mass constraints, sensor limitations etc?

Designing stuff for space involves a lot of challenges that typical engineering does not.

Plus, while the US and USSR may have done the necessary technical work, India doesn't get most of that knowledge and thus has to learn the lessons itself.

The budget with which this mission was accomplished is something.

Less than a typical hollywood movie budget.

Less even than some Bollywood movie budgets.

A lot of poor people were genuinely happy and inspired today.

Sorry to say but no contrarian thought in your comment.