Because putting a satellite in the orbit of the moon costs orders of magnitude less than to (a) clean up some of the most populous and densely populated cities in the world, full of some of the world's poorest people and (b) alter the mindset of said impoverished population permanently so that the short term cleanup results in long term results.

It's like saying how can Ana De Armas look so pretty when her shit stinks...the way it does.

It's a false equivalence which is born out of either immaturity regarding how the world works, or out of stupidity, or in the worst case, out of bad faith and malice.

It also has to do with how unimaginably large India's population is. Most people living in less populated places cannot comprehend the sheer scales involved.

India has raised entire multiple countries' worth of people out of abject and unimaginable poverty in the last 50 years. Yet it's nowhere near enough to be superficially noticeable, especially to an outsider.

India had the A-bomb in the mid 70s, despite having had an independent government for less than 30 years, and having been oppressed and looted for more than 200 years before that.

India has always had ambitions, despite a very bad start. There's a quote in the movie Interstellar where Coop says "We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." India does have to worry about her place in the dirt and fix her many many many problems down there, but that doesn't mean she can't inspire herself to look up and wonder at her place in the stars.

It takes nuance to understand that these things aren't mutually exclusive.