That thing about street level living standard is a very good point raised by you. I always say this to my fellow countrymen who get insecure about Indian gdp numbers, that despite being relatively poor we have it much better at ground level.
Recently I saw an Indian woman's video on Youtube comparing apartments for rent in Mumbai. In the 30k bracket there was an extremely dirty half bedroom flat with an equally shitty bathroom. In comparison in Karachi the equivalent of 30k INR which roughly becomes 90k PKR, one can easily get a decent 2-3 bedroom apartment with clean attached bathrooms. Not to mention the overcrowding everywhere. Man I despise crowds like a plague, at least we have plenty of relatively empty touristic stops up north.
If I got time I will make a dedicated thread on this topic. But that said we should not be comparing ourselves to India, otherwise we will always remain in this shitty situation. I think one of the reasons of our downfall is that both the elites and commons of our country have made India a threshold for progress, we think that if we are slightly better than them in any field then we have won, and that is the biggest mistake ever. Instead we should be looking towards Western/Northern Europe and China as role models of development.