One of the most unfortunate things about India is that the most popular tourist spots for foreigners are also essentially the equivalent of Hollywood, New York or San Francisco here. Mumbai, Agra, Amritsar, Delhi are important places, they have very significant parts of India history, but they have also been the prime urban spots since at least the Mughals, and so have collected the worst parts of all the population around them.
Combine this with the simple fact that most people outside of urban areas haven't been educated beyond their mother tongue, and going from say, a village in Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow, just a few kilometres, is like moving from Haiti to London. Many of the ruralite immigrants to urban areas act like they do in the villages, except once they move to the city, the social structure that should fix their behaviour as young men doesn't exist in the city, and the only thing that stops them is when the police finally take action and break their bones.
You can find great difference between Mumbai and Bangalore, with the latter only becoming a city very recently. Mumbai has a very powerful local government that maintains a strict monopoly on any system politicans can money off of. These people put their own in charge and almost nothing gets done. There are entire mafias based on controlling public infrastructure, where a program to fix basic issues have to go through layers of bureaucracy.
In Bangalore, or Hyderabad, or Thiruvanathapuram, the government is always volatile, and as such, most infrastructure is managed by indian private entities or through a partnership. Everything in these cities goes by smoothly once they are managed. I have seen the change personally, I arrived in Bangalore when it was a few developed areas surrounded by thick, freezing forest and grassland, and by now there's clean tap water, consistent electricity, smooth roads, suburbs, clean rivers and lakes, and I regularly see middle class people driving Porches and BMWs. Women can walk around dressed like whores and never be interrupted, I've never had to worry about safety walking at night in most parts of the city. There is a Metro system throughout the city, and when you go to these stations, the floors are spotless, the people are quiet, they never even get out of line. There's immigrants from the north that cause trouble, like organized begging, but I think the fact that organized begging can be a profitable industry speaks volumes about the cosistent prosperity acheived here. And most importantly, they learn to behave eventually.
I'm not saying it's perfect, no place is, and I'm not saying north=bad. I lived in the north for a long time and I know there are people there who could put their cities in order. The issue is just that a lot of these places have been developed long enough to have very well settled layers of corruption through businessmen and socialist politicians, small empires who depend on things staying as they are, which require strongmen to break through and cause change with ruthless abandon.
