I can't see any good commentary on this, but my guess is a lot of it is to do with the caste system, which has distorted India's IQ distribution.
In feudal times, society was directed by an upper class. And India had and has an intelligent and organised upper-class, which led to it being very productive. It appears that feudal societies slowly increase the IQ of a population over generations. An extended social hierarchy begins to emerge. The caste system guarded the higher levels in a way that led to much larger levels of unskilled and underclass people. There was such a surplus of underclass people in India that over the last two millennia 100s of millions people died in famines. Predominantly from the underclass.
Meanwhile in Europe and Arab areas the classes outside of the landed and ecclesiastical strata were allowed to arrange themselves. So when the feudal system began breaking down in Europe in the 1400s, they revealed that there were plenty of high IQ proto-middle-class people ready to rise through the growing commercial/mercantile society that came to overpower the landed class. As an example you have Isaac Newton, who was born about 150 years after the end of the dominance of the feudal system. He was from an English yeoman family. The yeoman was a feudal rank for a better trained militia man under the fealty of a knight (in turn under a baron, under the king). As the feudal system declined these yeomen transformed from the highest rank of militiaman/peasant to minor land owners. From the Elizabethan period more and more men from this rank became prominent, and they eventually overturned the later end of the landed-feudal class.
In short the European feudal system bred a class of people who were more intelligent, but there was little social mobility to rise. When social mobility opened up, they instantly rose. Meanwhile in India, that class was not created and the barriers to mobility remained in place until living memory. Now those barriers have been removed, we don't see the same rise of the lower caste Indians, because they've been in a 3,000-4,000 year eugenics system that bred them for low skill and low status.
While European countries witnessed the creation of a middle class, India remained under a feudal system for a long time. It didn't have the capability to exit it, as it didn't have the above outlined proto-middle class that Europe did. So instead, the most obvious thing happened - they were invaded again and again, both by the same Turkic-Mongol hordes that invaded Europe and the more technically advanced Muslims. The middle class development in India was imported. But that was a small fraction of the population. The important control of trade (post-feudal) was mostly foreign - Muslim and later European. And from those invasions onwards almost nothing native was contributed to the nation.
I think it's probably this reason why people might view India as a joke. Along with Bangladesh and parts of Pakistan, it's probably the only country in Eurasia with this extreme modification to IQ distribution. So when you travel to those countries, you may find upper class areas, but those areas typically have shacks on the sides of the road, beggars with arms and/or legs cut off. It's not a country that any middle-upper class person is going to see and think - I wouldn't mind living here.
Take other countries in the region - Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, China, Korea. All of them have permanent expat communities. India doesn't have that, as it is not viewed as a desirable place to live. It has one of the worse ease of doing business rating in the world. So it's not surprising that around 25% of Brahmin (high caste) have already left India, mostly in the last generation.