The service industry standards in India are quite bad, as I have had first hand experience of the sorry state of our development environment. I have thought about this for quite some time, and as others have pointed out there is a definite dearth of passion as the industry is filled with people who worry nothing more than their paychecks at the end of the month. It's quite hard to find motivation amongst such peers(Just to clarify, I'm not badmouth-ing anyone, just stating the fact)
At times it has often make me wonder at our consistent mediocre attitude. The top programming languages right now(Java, C++ etc) has had it's origins in the US and elsewhere, where the language authors have had put in painstaking efforts in creating libraries so as to make adoption of the language as easy as possible. The irony being since most of the hard work has already been done, the mediocre work gets outsourced for cheap labour.
Just my 2 paisa...
I think most people miss the point that the statistics provided by the Khan Academy is equally kick-ass as its videos. He mentions of a "teacher driven" design process.
