[crop_rotation]

India is just screwed. It is in this insane democratic autocratic hybrid where you don't get much freedoms but every government has to have a short term focus to win the next election and thus igniting caste/religion/other inflammatory issues.

Social media has caused this mass delusion where Indian problems can not even be discussed openly without being labelled a foreign agent or something worse. If you stop talking about the problems they don't just disappear.

For westerners, one quick thing you need to understand is that in India the written laws and constitution are totally irrelevant for day to day life, so the written law providing 100 freedoms is irrelevant. Anyone who has power can mostly do whatever they want to a large extent (offcourse there are limits basis how powerful they are). Just like in America it is said that the poor think of themselves as temporarily poor and rich someday, in India most people dream of gaining power and that sweet corruption money someday. People spend 5-10 years doing nothing but studying to get one of those sweet government jobs where bribes are universal and easily >5x your income.

Like in India everyone knows where black money is, well except the Government it seems. If the government had any interest in fixing tax avoidance they had many easy ways, but the Government is mostly interested in power.

[geodel]

> For westerners, one quick thing you need to understand is that in India the written laws and constitution are totally irrelevant for day to day life

Very important point. This explains how government use slick officials talking in english to address West in language of laws, norms, civilization, shared democratic values and things like that. All the while govt sanctioned/ supported elements do exactly opposite of what they claim to be doing when talking outside India.

The only thing changed in last 10-15 years is regime getting unusually sensitive to adverse foreign media coverage. Normally they resort to economic bullying of smaller nations to not utter a word which is not glowing praise of Indian regime. But for relations with West bullying may not work or can work against India so they are left with shrill whining on social platforms against western media.

[tinuviel]

So many sweeping generalizations, broad strokes and racist undertones in your comment. If you’ve led a middle class life in india, you’ll know most people don't dream of gaining power and sweet corruption money. They dream of honest work and pulling themselves out of poverty and being successful. The country has been wildly successful at this and has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty through economic liberalization and reforms, and has taken great strides in eliminating corruption through technology. Read about their mammoth push to get everyone a bank account and direct benefit transfers.

The people you allude to be dreaming of a cushy govt job that allows them to be corrupt is a tiny tiny % of their 1.3B population.

[crop_rotation]

Most people do dream of gaining power and the sweet corruption money, whether they can or not is a different matter. Your comment is the perfect example of what I was alluding to, trying to have a discussion on India's problems gets you labelled for "racist undertones".

> and has taken great strides in eliminating corruption through technology.

Please enlighten me with one example. What great strides have been taken in eliminating corruption. Go to any small town and most prime real estate is owned by government servants. Go to a big city and most prime real esate is owned by politicians or their adjacent entities.

> Read about their mammoth push to get everyone a bank account and direct benefit transfers.

This just removes a very very small slice of the corruption pie. If this is the best example from a long time then things don't look good.

> The people you allude to be dreaming of a cushy govt job that allows them to be corrupt is a tiny tiny % of their 1.3B population.

Just look at the numbers of people studying for years for the various Government exams. It is not tiny by any means. And 1.3 B is not the right yardstick, but the number of youths in that age group.

[chrismorgan]

I’m Australian by heritage, but have spent plenty of time in India and have more recently married and moved to India. The intense focus on getting government jobs (far beyond the point of irrationality, in my opinion, completely wasting years on a remote possibility), I can attest, from experience in West Bengal and Hyderabad, among lower- and middle-class Christians. But I wouldn’t say it need be about corruption: in fact, for many types of government jobs there’s not much opportunity for corruption (e.g. most of nursing). The biggest reason I’ve heard is the stability and certainty of a government job. My wife was once such a seeker for this reason.

As a private employee, you can be let go easily, whereas as a government employee, even dying may not lose you your job. I know a case where a man had a job in the post office, and died, and his widow was expected to inherit the job, and has done for five or ten years, although she is grossly incompetent at it (they would literally have done better to pay her twice as much to stay away).

[anon291]

India is not destined to be screwed, but it will be screwed if it continues to do what it does.

You've misidentified the problem though.

Everything in India is against the law. This allows Indian government officials to selectively prosecute and enforce the law. This leads to chaos.

You can talk about how this is due to voter politics, or whatever.

But it's not.

It's due to Indian parenting which broadly follows the same model of everything being wrong.

As someone whose parents migrated from India to America, believe me, I know exactly how this works. This cultural trait is so embedded in Indian culture, but it is possible to eliminate.

[hadlock]

> selectively prosecute and enforce the law ... Indian parenting model of everything being wrong. This cultural trait is so embedded in Indian culture, but it is possible to eliminate.

Can you expand on this, for better understanding by someone not familiar with this style of culture/parenting; and if you have any knowledge, does this also extend to Pakistani and Bangladeshi culture as well? Thanks

[sherr]

This article in The Economist recently would tend to agree : "Why all Indians are rule-breakers [1]

"IF YOU HAVE ever relaxed with a cold Kingfisher beer at the end of a long, sweaty day in Mumbai, the party capital of India, you have almost certainly broken the law. Specifically, you violated section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, under which you must hold a permit to drink booze. A first offence is punishable by a fine of 10,000 rupees ($115) and up to six months in prison. Welcome to India, where everything is against the law."

[1] https://archive.is/ONfHw

[crop_rotation]

One golden piece of wisdom from the above article

> The state of Uttarakhand, to pick one, requires couples in live-in relationships to register (and pay a fee) within 30 days of shacking up. Failure to comply attracts a fine and up to three months in prison. What of love lost? The unhappy couple must de-register (and pay another fee).

[southernplaces7]

The exact lunacies and irrationality that this Economist article describes are something that the Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto described in enormous detail in his book "The Other Path" (El Otro Sendero) roughly three decades ago when describing the at the time deeply dysfunctional aspects of regulatory administration in his native country, and in other Latin American states. He later wrote an abbreviated summary of the same findings in a book called "The Mystery of Capital".

Either way, (writing this purely from memory, so any mistakes entirely my own) his basic thesis was that states with massive informal markets and underdevelopment often far from having few laws, suffer from a grotesque surfeit of regulations, so many, so arbitrary, haphazard and irrational, that enforcing them all, or complying with them all, becomes completely impossible, and thus they're both enforced selectively, and adhered to selectively, based on convenience for either side of the equation. The result is widespread informality, a chronic inability to create formal capitalization that can be used in sophisticated ways for long-term economic development, and endemic tax evasion (not because almost everyone is a disgusting parasitic tax evader but because not evading while still trying to be entrepreneurial is nearly impossible).

EDIT: I can't speak for India, but in the country that I currently live in, Mexico, though things have improved in many ways for regulations around the basic process of starting a business or handling its financial paperwork, they're still totally inadequate for a vast portion of the working-age population, which includes dozens of millions of self-employed people who sustain themselves and a huge part of the economy entirely through informal service and product businesses that it would be extremely difficult for them to ever formalize. At the same time, without these businesses, run by these millions of people, the country's economy and social development would both collapse catastrophically.

Very worth reading, the books above, as warnings for any country and as solid analyses of how some countries lurch from economic disaster to economic disaster and never really develop effectively in a thorough way.

[FallCheeta7373]

Laws like these come in handy when you have politically prosecute people.

[triknomeister]

It is often truly the govt of many people in that sense, in the sense that the reason govt doesn't get rid of corruption is because 30-40% of population benefits from that corruption in some ways.