[anonri]

> Incompetence is a bigger problem than corruption in India. The systemic problems that face the society need ambition, will and technology.

This is the elephant in the room when it comes to India. There is just a huge amount of apathy amongst the people. A simple example is how much produce rots to waste as a result of poor transportation/refrigeration. There are so many processes crying out to be optimized.

As a US-born NRI, there are so many things that I find appalling that my family in India doesn't even notice. It's like they've been desensitized to all of these issues over the years to the point where they're not even really considered problems.

A lot of people believe the difference between India and China is that China's autocratic government allows them to modernize and improve their country much faster, but the truth is that democracy can be compatible with rapid modernization if the people are willing to work together. Even in China, the government is ruled by a large number of people - no one would say that Hu Jintao has a level of power even close to that of a dictator. The real difference is that the Chinese government has labored long and hard to improve living conditions for hundreds of millions of its citizens (though it has also brutally mistreated several million of them) while the Indian government has been sitting around twiddling its fingers.

[Retric]

Corruption directly results in inefficient systems.

Consider a road from A to B. Ideally you would want a strait line, but if someone owns land that would benefit from being near a road then you just bend the path a little and suddenly his land is worth more. As long as the person drawing that line has more to gain from bribes than an efficient road you are going to build a lot of odd looking roads. Taken to the extreme and you get roads that are less useful and more costly to build and maintain because they are longer.

[elangoc]

Exactly. Why is it that the smaller national highways and a few of the biggest airports only got nationalized recently (i.e., the past 2 years)? It's most likely that that the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi temporarily broke the spell of apathetic stupor. (or perhaps this only applies to South India, in which case that would be sad yet telling, since South India is the home to most of India's IT sector.)

India's high population and smaller landmass (--> higher pop dens) requires innovative, planned, coordinated strategies to conserve resources. To say that India is a democracy does not mean that it is a meritocracy. It still seems to be more like a feudal-like hierarchy inherited from the British, which itself was usurped and adapted from the feudal monarchies before. Most post-colonial states wrestle with issues of being too top-down, despotic, nepotistic.

Laws are only really worth anything if they can be adjudicated and enforced. What good is a law that no one respects? Everything is all about institutions and what they do, so celebrating a law might be premature since it's only 1/3 of the entire end goal -- you need the judiciary and the executive on the same page and working, too.