having people in india control it is probably isn't that much cheaper than hiring someone to actually drive it. it mostly likely does not cover your costs of developing systems to remotely control expensive and destructive construction equipment from thousands of miles away.
The exception is when you're operating in difficult environments, where the cost of putting people there is huge (life support costs, hazard pay, losses, etc.).
Space is the obvious example (manned spaceflight might be a good thing politically, or for inspiring people, but no one contests that robots are far more efficient for almost any mission).
A closer to home example is commercial diving. They used to pay people $100-500k/yr to do saturation diving, fairly frequently, at deep sites. Maybe 3-6 weeks of prep, a ship, a transfer chamber, on-deck chamber, a team of support staff, a team of divers, and lots of equipment. Instead, now, they send down a ROV (usually operated from the ship above, but conceivably these could be centrally teleoperated someday too, or autonomous). Commercial divers are still used for smaller tasks, especially where they're not doing saturation diving, but the saturation diving industry in general has been increasingly restricted to shallower jobs or jobs requiring a large amount of work at a single site (involving lots of manual fitting). For the very deepest dives, ROVs and atmospheric diving suits (basically single-person submarines) have basically taken over -- the deep dive record was set in 1992 and no one has tried to match it.
There's also the EOD market (iRobot's packbot), hazmat environments, war zones, etc., where teleoperated equipment will get more and more popular.
It's been a lot of years, and I think the information revealed by my posting on the topic is sufficiently de minimis that no harm is done. I did hesitate for a while over the "reply" button, though.
Workers are actually pretty expensive, more than $20 dollars per hour plus benefits. Then there is the risk of injury which is quite common in construction and mining. The workers in india wouldn't have those problems. To them it would like a video game (no injuries) and their pay would less than $1 per hour, no benefits.
We already have pilots flying drones in afghanistan from nevadda in real time.
The costs of this equipment are not much compared to the labor costs, so outsourcing is viable.
