Far more homeless people in India even on a per capita basis than any other S.Asian nation where there is poverty. Part of the reason is the backwardness, lack of resources, over-breeding and the terrible backward caste issue that plagues India. Hopelessness is on their faces when you travel to most parts of India and see people sleeping on cardboard, begging, hunting trash dumps and trying to collect some coins. While it is a Nuclear power and has the world's largest middle class with great purchasing power, it is really very backward. In states like Bihar people still have gangs and dacoits who ride horses. They rape and pillage low caste villages. If you travel like I have to S. Asian nations you will see India and Bangladesh the worst and Sri Lanka and Maldives on top in terms of human development with hardly any homeless people and hardly any beggars now..I am not sure how Pakistan is.

Their backward mentality can be gleaned when if you ask a person "are you a hindu" the usually poorer people will say "Yes i am and i am a Brahmin Hindu" to assert their caste superiority over the others.. It is really sad to see how there are Two Indias far worse than any place in Asia. Illegal immigrants from Tamil Nadu are again trying to go to Sri Lanka(Ceylon) now that their terrorism war is over. They are working there in tea shops, as servants, as farmers because even though they are poor they have a far better chance in Sri lanka. So India pretends it does not happen. On a recent UN visit, Sri Lankan authorities talked about how in the 1950s and 60s their biggest law and order problem was illegal immigrants from India. It stopped when the brutal war was going on in Sri Lanka. Now that the war is over despite all the problems of discrimination, the S.Indian poor want to come do business trading wares on the roads, working hard in tea shops, restaurants etc like Mexicans do here because they too are far more hardworking than the Sri Lankan race of Sinhalese and are willing to do a lot of backbreaking work. That is why the Indian Tamils were brought to Ceylon as indentured laborers in the 1800s by Britain and settled in the Hills to work the fabulous Tea gardens. That permanently altered the demographics of Ceylon. Later when there were repatriation arrangements almost all the indian tamils preferred their meager existence in Ceylon to going back. They are all from poor backward lower caste S.Indian groups and they did not have a chance in India.. It is a huge political issue because the British displaced the native Ceylonese when they established the tea gardens and forcefully planted Indian Tamils in the hills.