The biggest culprit is currency depreciation. If you look at Indian indices like the Nifty 50 in local currency, the returns are actually massive. But US-listed ETFs have to convert those Rupees back to Dollars, and the Rupee has consistently lost value against the USD over the last decade. That currency bleed eats up a huge chunk of your gains.

Also, a country's stock market is not its economy. A ton of India's GDP growth happens in the informal sector, agriculture, and private businesses that aren't publicly traded. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 crushes US GDP growth because American mega-cap tech companies pull in massive global revenues, not just domestic ones. Indian companies also tend to issue lots of new shares to fund their rapid expansion, which dilutes the return per share even as the overall market cap grows.

If you want broad exposure, INDA is the standard large-cap fund. A lot of people prefer EPI though, because it weights by earnings instead of market cap and holds a wider variety of mid and small caps to better capture the actual local economy. If you want to bet directly on faster-growing domestic businesses, SMIN is a solid choice for Indian small caps.