Remember when India conjured images in the western world of hundreds of millions of people starving in the streets?

That concept is getting a little threadbare.

And now we have more evidence of it:

A group of Indian investors just paid $333 million for an expansion franchise in the Indian Premier League. That is, India’s cricket league.

That’s serious money, $333 million. Just to get into the IPL, which is expanding from eight franchises to 10 in 2011.

How much is $333 million?

It’s more than the 2009 worth of five Major League Baseball teams, according to Forbes. (Those five: Tampa Bay, Oakland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Florida.)

You couldn’t buy a National Football League team with $333, but American baseball is a sort of cousin of cricket, and it is interesting that a league with very little history already is demanding that sort of investment just to buy in.

This story in Business Week notes how the IPL has exploded since its founding, just two years ago, and how India’s billionaires seem infatuated with getting involved.

The league clearly has a good business model, and major TV support.

But cricket, a game codified by the British and exported by them to India, also has seized the imagination of India’s 1-plus billion people.

Because India is good at cricket. (As opposed to just about any other sport; India does horribly in the Olympics and is shockingly bad in soccer.)

Indian currently is ranked No. 1 in the world in the traditional (five-day) form of the game. For the first time. And that has provided a major boost in national pride.

The IPL plays an abbreviated version of cricket known as Twenty20, with matches completed in about three hours. Traditionalists don’t like it, but clearly it is quite marketable.

So, bang, there goes India, all major league.  And maybe there is room there for some of the other world sports: soccer and basketball, in particular.

Last one into this market is a rotten egg!