> Is this cultural?

Its incentives. If you’re an Indian student in India, unless you go to a prestigious university, your prospects of landing a job, let alone a good one are very small. Even tech companies that claim to be meritocratic elsewhere, rarely screen resumes beyond the top universities in India. The only other real prospect is to get your resume to stand out. Open source contributions, research papers etc are some ways to do that. And the talented ones make contributions, while the rest just try to fake it in the hopes to make it (it obviously doesn’t work).

There are similar incentives if you want your college application to stand out if you’re trying to go abroad for higher education. And if you’re already outside India, those incentives extend to job applications outside India. If you’re an international student looking for a job, even if you have work experience at known multinational companies, if it’s in India, the experience doesn’t count.

It’s all about incentives and responding to them.