There were Indian pioneers in several scientific fields but they were few and far between.
Say WHAT?! India was a major center of innovation in at least medicine, artillary and mathematics
Furthermore, most of the weaknesses you mention India having, Europe also had during the same time period.
As far as mercantile weakness, India during the period before the British took over was taking over the markets next door with such underhanded tactics as having better accounting techniques and better "corporate" organization and accountability to home office. Indian mercantile techniques were weaker than those of the British to be sure, but the British were rather advanced for Europe. India as a whole was probably ahead of Western Europe as a whole at this point. And indeed, that was one of the reasons why the British could take them over so easily. Kinda like the way the US having advanced corporations made it easy for Japanese companies to move in and buy those companies. In the same sense, the British moved into India and bought bought and sold goods and services like Toyota buys and sells their goods and services in the US. And for most of the history the British were doing this, they were no more likely to dictate the running of the country than Toyota can dictate the running of America today. Indeed, they appeared so weak and innocuous that they were often preferred to locals competing in the same markets.
All the territory falling under the Mughal empire was deemed to be owned by the emperor. Land or rather landlord rights might be given as a reward to a courtier and in return he would be given a rank relating to the number of cavalrymen he was supposed to provide the emperor during wartime. But on the nobleman's death, the land reverted to the emperor. By tradition he would parcel the landlord rights back to the heir, but this didn't always happen.
That is rather counter to my understanding which is that land was owned by the local villages, the Mughals and the nobility only had the right to tax it. Which is why there was a dissinterest in improving the land - they didn't get the benefit, because however good or bad the land was, they only had the right to tax X, so they may as well focus their efforts on improving the efficiency of their extraction technique, rather than put effort into the difficult business of improving productivity.
You would probably then also have to change the Hindu faith. Make it more adaptable and easier to meld itself to local cultures and customs. A stronger Hindu faith is better for India in the long run. if I were you I would look more towards Classical Era Afghan Empires that established themselves in the North of India.
The Hindu faith is rather masterful at adapting itself to local cultures and customs. Indeed, the Hindu faith is the borg of religions. It is still busy borg-ing away and assimmilating its way through Southern India, to such a degree that we think of Southern India as being indivisible from Northern India today, when historically these were culturally and geographically very, very different regions.
Anyways. As the old saying goes "there is alot of ruin in a nation", well, that's even more true in a sub-continent. There is also a great deal of amazing stuff in a nation. So India in 1730, like Western Europe in 1730, was a place of amazingness and ruin. It is easy to cherry pick from stories of ruin and stories of amazingness to bias the reader as you (the author) likes. Which is a real problem, since there isn't alot of unbiased history about India.
I think the main problem India had was the collapse of the Mughal Empire - a centralized, comercially advanced empire - whosel timed to allow the British to take advantage and use the levers of power built by the Mughals to extend their trade in the sub-continent. Protecting that trade would then force them to start ruling the sub-continent. Had the Mughal collapse moved by say 50 years, so in coincided with the French Revolution, then the British might have been too distracted to take advantage before a more local group took advantage of the untended levers of power to take control. At that point, the sub-continent probably would have followed a trajectory like China - too strong to colonize, too weak to avoid quasi-colonization. Or possibly, India would have given birth to one or several imperialist states, that while still playing catch up with Britain, would still be ahead of Europeans like the Russians, and ended up being some of the big players in the 19th Century.
Or alternatively, if the Mughals had been less successful, so instead of a centralized empire whose fate was effectively the fate of the whole of South Asia, from Iran to Vietnam, there were alot of small competing states, each following their own small rises and falls.
fasquardon