> I find it surprising how we have a functioning society with such underfinanced and overworked police, even in the well to do urban areas.
At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Things I saw during my visits:
- Cops refusing to file a report after a theft.
- No medical or police help during accidents. It's up to the untrained passers-by to administer some form of first aid and take an injured person to medical care facility.
- Motorcycle riders driving on sidewalks.
- Cars driving on the wrong side of the road.
- Drivers not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks.
- Tuk-tuks refusing rides in gross violation of government regulations.
- Damage and pilferage of public property in Indian Railways.
- Eunuchs extorting money from unsuspecting people in broad daylight.
Some of these things are not exceptions but the rule. This does not consititute a functioning society per my expectations and standard of living. This is a total breakdown of law, order, civility, decency, and courtesy in society.
>>Some of these things are not exceptions but the rule.
You could be downvoted, the real reason is so many Indians don't even think this is anything wrong. Globalization has presented an opportunity for Indians like me to travel abroad and see how well the systems work outside. For a lot of Indians, something like this is invisible. Often the exposure is to infrastructure seen through Hollywood movies or these days, YouTube.
The 3 years or so I spent in Bay Area,CA literally floored my mind. Things as simple as getting a California State Identity card without bribes, to VTA drivers saying Good morning. Trains run on time, parks are kept clean. People pay taxes, police doesn't ask for bribes, people cleaning up after their dogs in parks. I have even seen emergency services arrive in like minutes in case of accidents in places like Sunnyvale.
Heck when I was there the Santa Clara County was doing some water harvesting project for millions. That's like a small residential area equivalent in Bangalore, the scale and audacity of ambition itself was shocking to me. The contrast being, a place like Koramangala in Bangalore, would probably debate to death to a get a leaf composter and instead burn the leaves and pollute the air around.
Well, what you said is true. But the society in India functions, though in its own way...
I think it all comes down to population and resulting resource crunch, leaving folks trying to find all sorts of ways to use situations to their advantage.
While one can argue that it comes as a part of culture as well, I would say the said culture develops because while we can act self-less and well-mannered for some time or even some generations, poverty and competition eventually gets to you and makes you behave it all sorts of ways.
Corruption only adds to the plight. That must be stopped.
I recently watched a Youtuber visiting India who witnessed these guys dressed as women and going from store to store, asking for money after clapping. It was puzzling. Anyway, this article explains what was going on.
When the British left India, there was officially a transfer of power to the congress party. The first prime minister was appointed by the party. The constitution, the police, the bureaucracy and the court system was inherited by the people.
Unlike the developed world or China or Vietnam, India did not go through a bloody revolution. What that meant is that systems that were explicitly meant to harass and exploit the people is what we have inherited.
India runs two parallel systems, the official system and the traditional system. In the past [up until recently] urbanites [directly or indirectly worked for the govt] who were also the elitists suffered the official system but also benefited from it. The rural masses [80+%] were out of the official system.
Today with greater urbanisation, more and more people not used to the official system and forced to deal with it in their own way. First generation urbanites out number the original city dwellers.
There is a need to have a small government, lower red tape, hopefully the new government which has an overwhelming majority can carry out the overhaul necessary to set things right.
In a way Trump and his trade war can be a good thing and push Indians to realise, that they can not continue being the "source of raw material, cheap labour and a huge captive market" - exactly how the colonist always wanted us to be.
Could you recommend some reading to dive deeper into this narrative?
It is very interesting, reminds me something I couldn't grasp now. Probably some theory about an inherent nature of Russia's failures or something like. But, you know, it is hard to think of such a matters when the main example is your own country, it is hard to keep objectivity. I'd be happy to read about India.
By the way, I believe, that a bloody revolution wouldn't help India to create a different society. Take a Russia as an example: there was revolution of 1917, which overthrown Tzar, but communists came and they built authoritarian state just like in old times. With a Stalin as a dictator instead of Tzar. Tzar was meant to have a God given rights to rule, Stalin had the same rights given him by a proletariat. Even the scale of a corruptions the same, and one of the theories explaining them goes as far as to X century to track the start of bribery as a way to pay wages to government representatives, then bribes were made illegal, but it lasts for a centuries without a much success. Tzar, communists, now "democrats" are all failed to change it.
In 1991 USSR had failed, and there were a failure of a society, but in a few years a new society emerged, then gathered strength and finally we have all the same, the only difference are flags and slogans. We see the return of a God, though for now no one claims yet that Putin is a God given ruler.
The kind state you could build in a society are constrained heavily by a culture of a society (not the painting and architecture, but the culture in almost biological meaning, something that goes from mother to a child, something that is almost as sticky as a genetics). At the same time the culture of a society have a great inertia, you couldn't change it in a few years of a bloody revolution and a civil war.
You’ve diagnosed the problem well, but I don’t understand how that leads to “smaller government” being a solution. In many regards are relate to civic responsibility, India probably needs bigger government. They need it both to enforce the small laws (litter, traffic rules, safety regulations) as well as building the sustained infrastructure to make life more convenient (mass transit to deal with traffic, public housing so people aren’t in slums, sanitation services to clean up after everything, etc.) And then there is the need to create and maintain the public spaces to accommodate all these people, like parks and libraries.
I think both of you are right. We need a smaller existing type of government, and we need a bigger new type of government, which is more answerable to the people.
Consider, for example, the police force. They are not customer (inasmuch as you can call the voter/taxpayer a customer) oriented force; they are a subjugation force. They carry sticks around, which they wield with gay abandon. Many of the forms of power in the current system are meant to keep the people down and subservient.
To continue this example: what we need are fewer state-level (where "state" is the region in question) police, and more local (city-level or district-level) police. We need more power on quality-of-life issues devolved to the local bodies, and less with the state or the feds.
Local control is a double edged sword. It may make them more sensitive to local issues if they’re part of the community, but it can also lead to arbitrary enforcement or non-enforcement from one area to another or between one group or another.
The smaller the political unit, the more likely it is to be dominated by a clique of people. This can lead to corruption, but even in a non-corrupt setting it can lead to racist, casteist, or other kinds of discriminatory decisions about enforcement or resource allocation.
When I say small government - I only meant that the government should lower regulations and simplify laws. In the case of India, I am even in favour of the government stepping in to help fledgling industries, either because the local industry is so far behind or because foreign companies are deliberatly unwilling to be inclusive.
India does not have the ability to enforce - Lacks the resources to police and the diversity prevents uniformity.
Add to that draconian colonial/socialist era laws.
It is hard to enforce anything if you neither have the capacity nor need.
As an old civilisation India has an enormous capacity to self regulate. Compared to say the EU, India is way more diverse yet a single country and not by force.
A sane change would be to have bare-bone laws and swift justice on - property, business, greater personal freedom in education.
Complicated laws only favour the rich, powerful and definitely the corrupt. If the honest thrive, it would be increasingly expensive to be dishonest.
For the most part, a functioning government is non-existent in India. The primary activity of both the federal/central and state governments in India is theft (through bribes as well as taxes), and being a drag on the economy. It's not unlike a Mafia-run protection racket. If you don't pay bribes or taxes, you either get in trouble, or don't get basic services. A good chunk of the tax revenue is robbed by at various points due to corruption, and rarely does the majority of it actually get used for public services. The fact that the streets of most major Indian cities lay strewn with garbage, is just one testament to the brokenness of public services in India.
Beyond that, the degree to which the governments in India have stifled economic growth and the potential of the country is truly horrifying. Up until around 1990, the governments agenda was perpetual poverty as they made it impossible for people to start businesses, by imposing significant red tape, and requiring regulatory approval for every little thing (look up "License Raj").
>>Up until around 1990, the governments agenda was perpetual poverty as they made it impossible for people to start businesses, by imposing significant red tape, and requiring regulatory approval for almost every little thing. (look up "License Raj").
The more things change, the more they remain same. You can't exactly fix these things with laws. You need to have cultural change at some point in time.
I remember a colleague telling a story about a product company shuttering its offshore center in India. A lot of Indian colleagues stood up and spoke passionately about the benefits and advantages of doing business in India, including access to talent. Apparently the boss in US, he was a CTO just stoop up asked us a simple question:
What do you guys make in India?
It was a fairly simple question, it was a kind of brutal self appraisal, but apart from making soaps and clothing and ball point pens, you really struggle to answer the question. What IP do we build here? and what do we make that we sell, like products? Compare this with any top world economy today like US, China, Germany, UK etc. You begin to realize how far behind we are.
India is all about reselling things we don't make. In this kind of an economy, higher your population, more hands the goods change through. Each person gets a cut, you could linear interpolate this, have a 3 billion population and even exceed US economy. But it will change nothing in people's living standards, or quality, it won't give them quality education or health care, or anything for that matter. Basically numbers look beautiful, while nothing changes on the ground.
Lastly Indian love for bureaucracy and red tape is undying and eternal. This comes from aristocracy and government. People think being management jobs means doing 0 work and having access to slaves who serve them while making big money. Ivy League grads aspire to do MBA's from top colleges. Programmers want to be managers ASAP. Pretty much all my cousins have a distance education MBA. No appetite for engineering.
In short you can't change this with laws. People have to change.
> It was a fairly simple question, it was a kind of brutal self appraisal, but apart from making soaps and clothing and ball point pens, you really struggle to answer the question. What IP do we build here? and what do we make that we sell, like products?
Just to add to what others had said:
1. Moser Bauer is (was?) the largest manufacturer of CDs in the world. Sure, few people use CDs anymore these days, but 20 years ago, MB was a giant.
2. Essel Propack is the leader by far of packaging material like the tubes your toothpaste comes in.
3. India had a pivotal role in stopping the AIDS epidemic in Africa. India offered a year's supply of anti-retroviral drugs (for AIDS patients) to Africans for $300/year; companies in the West were demanding 100x as much. Just imagine the number of lives saved thanks to this move alone.
4. Lifestyle ideas like yoga, meditation, vegetarianism are all heavily influenced by India.
5. India had been doing "organic farming" for millennia; Albert Howard learned organic farming techniques from Indian farmers, and spread them in the West. He's known as the "father of modern organic farming". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Howard
> India is all about reselling things we don't make
Boy, you are a downer! Things are not the best, but they're not all bad either. Here are some important things India makes:
1. Movies - it has the largest (by number of productions) film industry in the world, and third largest by revenue (admittedly the latter is expected and it's third by a fair distance)
2. Satellite launch services - Antrix corporation, run by the Indian government no less.[1] And it makes a profit, what a crazy world we live in!
3. Generic medicines - Largest manufacturer of these in the world[2].
4. Motorcycles - The 2 largest motorcycle manufacturers in the world are Indian companies. [3][4] Are their bikes household names in developed countries today? No, but neither were Honda or Toyota in 1960.
5. Steel and cement - Apparently the 2nd largest steel and cement producer in the world (I didn't know this)[5][6] but also admittedly a long way off first place.
I didn't have the time or patience to research more, but you get the idea.
> What IP do we build here?
Most countries don't produce that much valuable IP in this stage of their growth. That comes later, when the basics - manufacturing, laws, financial systems, transport - have been firmed up. Having said that I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of useful research from the IITs or IIS or ISRO or BARC.
> Compare this with any top world economy today like US, China, Germany, UK etc. You begin to realize how far behind we are.
That's why (apart from China) they're referred to as "developed" countries and India is not.
> Programmers want to be managers ASAP.
You may find that outside the technology industry, it's like that everywhere. Anecdote: a few years ago, I caught up with an old acquaintance (who was raised in the US) working at an American consulting company in the Midwest. When he found out I'm a software engineer in the Bay Area he said "Oh, you're just a programmer." and sounded disappointed.
Correct. You just proved what the CTO said, We are experts at replicating X at scale, once some one originally produces X. We didn't invent the video camera, or modern studio tech, or internal combustion engine, even rocket tech, electricity, electronics, medicinal sciences, metallurgy or anything for that matter. Heck we didn't even invent the ball point pen.
We replicate and resell things, we kind of have to, because there are so many people in India and every wants X. Apply this to cement, movies, motorcycles, medicines, pens, pencils, call center employees, human robots, trench and ditch diggers, even baby diapers. We live in a country where the government rolls out schemes for daily labor occupation, to keep them busy by helping them dig with shovels. You can even boast of largest human shovel operators in the world. Heck we are experts are producing more human beings, than any country on earth. You might want to add that to our list of accolades, then take your right hand and pat yourself on your back.
Keep producing more humans like this, eventually we will be largest producers and consumers of everything, diabetes patients to pick pocketers and then we can claim what we always claim, we are the best of the best, put all criticism to rest, join hands and sing Mera Bharat Mahan.
None of this fixes anything because you end up creating more mouths and more hands to change. More deeper human chains to act as middle men. Numbers keep increasing of course, but situation doesn't change much on the ground.
This (more or less accurate) charge of being copycats who do little domestic innovation was true earlier of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, and before them of Japan. It was true for decades of China too. This is just what happens when you’re doing catch up growth. There are huge easy wins by doing in your country what other people in other countries already know how to do, but cheaper because labour is cheap in your country because you’re poor. Or in taking a poorly managed company and making it marginally better managed every year until you’re as productive as the leading firms in your industry were a decade or two decades ago. Innovation is great but not being poor does not require innovation, it requires doing things that are well within the technological frontier. Eventually some small industrial cluster approaches the global frontier and then is at it in some industry. It just takes time.
That's true, but then for that to happen you need a working government and society, you can't do that if inefficiencies abound. China, Japan and South Korea all had powerful governments who made hard choices, India's on the other hand is weak and ineffective.
It’s actually worse than weak and ineffective. If it was weak and ineffective then effective organisations would be able to make an end run around it, whether by corruption or by using politics to institute policy changes. India has a powerful government that’s captured by domestic constituencies that love the current sclerotic system. The Licence Raj lasted 50 years because powerful people wanted it. Moving from the current system to something better will require taking on some of these groups.
You need to put human resources development as the number one priority. As of now these are not even political issues in India. Nobody thinks these are important things to do.
Jawaharlal Nehru referred to him as Mir-i- Karawan (the caravan leader), "a very brave and gallant gentleman, a finished product of the culture that, in these days, pertains to few".[16] Mahatma Gandhi remarked about Azad by counting him as "a person of the calibre of Plato, Aristotle and Pythagorus".[27]
India hasn't had good quality leadership in human resources for a while now.
The current priorities of HR development ministers in India go on the line of rewriting history to propel their political propaganda, pushing things like homeopathy, astrology. Hating universities and academia, calling them elites who need to be eliminated for their political ideas to be taken forward.
You don't do much in Human resources building with these kind of systems in place.
Education has remarkably little to do with economic growth. Richer countries are more educated but changes in education do not predict changes in productivity. Education appears to be a superior good that people just purchase more of when they’re richer.
Ghana is more educated now than France was in 1960 going by average years of education and it’s poorer. China’s years of explosive economic growth after Deng opened it up in the 1980s happened with a population that had on average finished primary school.
India’s plan to build a highly educated workforce and industrial base in tandem was a thorough and costly failure. Lots and lots of people tried to get a good education so they could go for civil service jobs. It did nothing industrially because running a successful industrial policy is a lot harder than either leaving businessmen to their own devices, taxes and regulation aside, to make their own business decisions, or running a captured, cronyistic industrial that wastes money and is swept aside as soon as the policy is abolished. Ireland, India, Pakistan, Argentina; there are many countries that wasted enormous sums on infant industry tariffs to no benefit.
From the Section
“The Education Premium: Personal versus National”
> “When we move to the national level, these clean results vanish.65 Some prominent economists find that boosting national education slightly impoverishes countries rather than enriching them.66 Others report small positive effects; one typical estimate is that an extra year of national education boosts national income by 1.3%–1.7%.67 Remaining papers find moderate positive effects; the effect of national education on national income roughly equals the effect of personal education on personal income.68 No matter what they find, researchers usually confess their answers are highly uncertain.69”
> “65. For overviews, see Pritchett 2006, Bosworth and Collins 2003, and A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001.
66. See, e.g., Pritchett 2001, pp. 367–91, Islam 1995, and Benhabib and Spiegel 1994.
67. A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001, p. 1125, columns (2), (3), and (5).
68. For a survey, see Lange and Topel 2006, pp. 462–70.
69. One major exception: D. Cohen and Soto 2007 emphasizes the high quality of their data and the low uncertainty of their results. But even their findings dramatically hinge on their sample. When they look at 59 countries over 1960–90, a year of education raises national income by 4.9%. When they look at 81 countries over 1970–90, a year of education raises national income by 9.0% (D. Cohen and Soto 2007, p. 68, columns 5 and 10).”
> We replicate and resell things, we kind of have to,
You clearly missed what I said here.
> Most countries don't produce that much valuable IP in this stage of their growth.
Seriously read that again. Every developed country has started out copying, manufacturing, and then moved up the value chain to inventing. That's how countries develop - Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore are some examples of this. And even then ISRO and BARC have had to re-create a ton of aerospace and nuclear research on their own, on account of being frozen out of the international research community for decades.
> Heck we are experts are producing more human beings, than any country on earth
Actually India's fertility rate is only a shade above the global average. So it's middle-of-the-pack on that measure, not a world-leader :-)
> Then we can claim what we always claim, we are the best of the best, put all criticism to rest, join hands and sing Mera Bharat Mahan.
Try to ease up on the negativity, anger, and extreme opinions a bit. Everything is not awesome but it's not all bad either.
> The primary activity of both the federal/central and state governments in India is theft (through [...] taxes),
This is just nonsense. Taxation has nothing to do with theft.
> If you don't pay [...] taxes, you either get in trouble, or don't get basic services.
As you should. Not getting in trouble for tax evasion would be a sign of a dysfunctional government.
> A good chunk of the tax revenue is robbed by at various points due to corruption, and rarely does the majority of it actually get used for public services.
> So is this, of course.
Up until around 1990, the governments agenda was perpetual poverty
People who are pointlessly evil, not just egoistic and corrupt, are rare. I don't think the Indian people managed to elect them into government for decades.
At the risk of being downvoted, I feel compelled to offer a foreigner's perspective here. As a foreigner who has lived in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai for 2 to 6 months many times, I have to agree with the other commenter that I did not find a functioning society. Things I saw during my visits:
- Cops refusing to file a report after a theft.
- No medical or police help during accidents. It's up to the untrained passers-by to administer some form of first aid and take an injured person to medical care facility.
- Motorcycle riders driving on sidewalks.
- Cars driving on the wrong side of the road.
- Drivers not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks.
- Tuk-tuks refusing rides in gross violation of government regulations.
- Damage and pilferage of public property in Indian Railways.
- Eunuchs extorting money from unsuspecting people in broad daylight.
Some of these things are not exceptions but the rule. This does not consititute a functioning society per my expectations and standard of living. This is a total breakdown of law, order, civility, decency, and courtesy in society.