Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse.
By the standards of the west, Mumbai or Delhi certainly are "paragons of failure". That's the problem with living in a developing country. It's not a failure of density, the low density regions of India are vastly worse.
So if India and all its cities had 4 times as many people would it be better off? The population is so high that wages are so low that talented people are fleeing the country.
Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. Excepting just 6 out of 84, your list thoroughly proves my point; over crowding correlates with societies with suppressed labor value.
And by the way, in spite of adding endless supply of housing, none of these cities have cheaper real-estate than the rest of their country.
I only mentioned the 8 cities on that list which I've spent enough time in to form an opinion.
As for the one I gave a negative opinion about, a big part of my dislike for Delhi is due to the lack of density - it's more suburb than city. Going from where I work/live (Pitampura) to the fun parts of town (South Delhi) takes 1-1.5 hours and the metro shuts off at ~11pm. (Other things I dislike are pollution, oily food, and the difficulty in finding a date.)
India almost certainly will be better off after people escape rural poverty and enter the middle class living in the cities. This process is happening rapidly and the results are good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse.
By the standards of the west, Mumbai or Delhi certainly are "paragons of failure". That's the problem with living in a developing country. It's not a failure of density, the low density regions of India are vastly worse.