> the perpetrators celebrating their ill-gained profits
is it possible that some authors intended to teach children what reality is?
Some have no axiology evident around them, and call for teaching them that e.g. "there can exist good behavior";
some live in a world faithful to its crudeness, and call for teaching them that it is something they should digest soon.
If so, it wasn't apparent to me. If you compare the original story of Ariel (the little mermaid) to how it's presented today, you absolutely can make out a very coherent, but unpleasant moral there. The original story (that didn't have a happy ending) was saying "know your place", if you chase something attractive that is out of your usual circle of things, you'll spend the rest of your short and miserable life in agony, and will die misunderstood and abandoned. And the story made an emphasis on this being especially relevant to young women who might get this crazy idea about marrying a prince.
We, today, don't feel comfortable with that moral, so we replaced "know your place" with "follow your heart" and "anything is possible if you try hard enough".
That Indian story didn't have enough of a dramatic effect. The bear was taken for a fool... but I don't even know if the author thought that maybe bears, in general, deserve such harsh treatment, or was it because the author thought that the kind of low-key scam that the couple turned on a bear was witty (kind of like Hodja Nasruddin's stories, which are another can of worms for what is socially acceptable today, but is, at least understandable). And even if it was the later, well, we still have the genre of heist movies, or pirate books, where the reader is expected to admire the robbers for their ingenuity and dedication to the cause. But this couple, literally got a pot of rice and a handful of pears for their efforts... also, throughout the story they weren't characterized with any abilities to outsmart anyone.
Well, that story is just outright weird to me. I'd need to find someone who grew up in India in the province the story came from to figure out why the story is the way it is. I bet there must be something lost in translation there.