>>7314
I am(rather,was) quite involved with the country's math olympiad program quite closely. Won't go into too many details about my experience there, as it would dox me.
Post pandemic, there has been a huge shift in the Indian IMO training camp, as the strong kids who won golds/silvers around 2016-2019 were handed the responsibility to curate training material and selection tests for the team. They changed the style and quality of the material/tests for good, and they became considerably harder. Now, the Indian team selection tests(TSTs) and the Indian National Math olympiad(INMO) are quite comparable to the national MOs and TSTs of other top countries, both in quality and difficulty. Earlier, our TSTs were just copied from previous year IMO shortlists, which is a standard and classic source of problems that everybody does(ie. not a very high quality resource).
Another great factor is the fact that major online coachings like Vedantu, Allen etc. launched proper batches for the starting stages of the selection for the Indian MO team. This generated a lot of interest in the masses(as people saw olympiads as an opportunity to excel in JEE/get into foreign unis) and got a lot of talent to stream into the system. Also, for the first time in history, such introductory batches were available to everyone, rather than the top students of the top batches in such coachings.
However, this was a very good and experienced team, and most of them were in 12th and had participated in the IMO/IMOTC multiple times before. Would be interesting to see if the new team next year will be able to keep up with the legacy left behind by the current crop.
TLDR: bit of both