I will say rather South India is relatively performing better recently due to its large pool of technical and higher educated skilled human resource and its nothing to do with its retention of historical Indian civilization. Investment in private engineering colleges and higher studies started in South India roughly three decades ago and it is paying back now. This time was quite earlier than many other states in India invested in this area. The only non-south Indian state which started investing in private engineering college and higher studies at point of time was Maharastra and which is equally competitive with other South Indian states. In commerce and business Maharastra is still ahead of all South Indian states and three of its cities like Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Pune are equally competitive with Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai for IT and biotech industries. So, correlation between investment in human resource (in higher education, engineering, management and science by generating higher number of skilled man power at low wages) and recent success story of South India would hold better both logically and practically. This is evident from the case of Malaysia and Philippine.
