India is the nation with the most problems

[my2cents]

Some how i get a feeling that OP is genuine in his views and the post needs a detailed reply....... Will spend some time and reply..... and request my countrymen not to troll

I feel the same way and we should not sugar coat our problems as if they don't matter.

 

[gau8av]

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older.Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.

The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!

One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates, nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing. The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime.

Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it. And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.

I have not returned toIndia since I wrote this in 2009–I hope to return in 2014 or 2015.That’s four years and a lot can change. That being said, things change slowly in India. I remember visiting a village in China in1999 and then returning in 2003. Vastly different place. And thenthere was my first visit to Delhi in 2003, my second in 2005 and mythird in 2009. Not much had changed, except parts of the subway wereopen. So, take my criticism with a grain of salt, as it might verywell be dated. Although I would bet money that Delhi is still just asfilthy as it ever was.

Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley certainly did, and he called India right way back in 2007. On a visit to Bombay he noted that the infrastructure was horrid and would at some point become a serious bottleneck to economic growth to the country. How did he come up with such a fanciful economic prediction? Did he run a quantitative model on the country? Did he look at its current account deficit and extrapolate out? Did investment banking friends of his tell him that at some point they’d simply stopped lending to India because of some hidden fundamentals they’d uncovered and didn’t like?
None of those actually–and probably all of them at a later date. At the time he made this prediction, however, based on a lot of his own personal experience in the developing world and one critical observation he had while on the trip. He was on India’s sole north to south superhighway (only four lanes total at the time) and his car almost his a cow.

Here were are in late 2013 and his prediction has pretty much come true. Economic growth in India has been cut in half–actually more than half from its peak after the “reforms” of the 1990s. The main problem is that there is no manufacturing–and if there were, as I clearly said back in 2009 it couldn’t get to port because of India’s shitty infrastructure. Therefore, there is very little employment growth. Yet, the extraction economy continues and India, by some measures, has actually gotten worse.
Let’s recount just where India now stands in 2013:
All of the following stats were gleaned from and/or directly quoted from the above-linked Mishra story, so read it.
One hundred people in India are worth $300 billion, 25% of the nation’s GDP.
Brazil grew by only 1% between 1993 and 2005 but reduced poverty twice as quickly as India.
Bangladesh, which is half as rich as India on a per capita basis, has a longer life expectancy, better child mortality and immunization rates than India.

The 2011 census of India revealed that half of Indian households practiced open defecation. For those of you who are daft, this statistic means that one of every two people in the country takes a shit in public. I don’t like to euphemize. No toilets, so men just unzip their trousers or women hike up their saris, squat down and shit. In public.
Good enough visual for you?
“Almost half of Indian children are underweight,” compared to 25% in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Calorie and protein intake among the poor has actually dropped” in India since the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 60s.
Mishra writes: “The skies are polluted. The rivers are dead or dying. Waters tables are falling. Forests are disappearing.”
The man who very well may be the next Prime Minister of India—Narendra Modi—was barred from traveling in the United States for his alleged complicity in communal violence—also known as incitement to race or religion based mass murder—in Gujurat in 2002 that left 1,000 Muslims dead.
Overall, says Pankaj Mishra, “India’s economy grew at about 5% in the 80s, ran up to nearly 10% and recently has slowed to less than half that rate in recent months.”

Yes, there is a middle class in India with pent up consumer demand, which likes Western and global brands. They are gobbling up as much as they can. This middle class finds its incomes in real estate, IT, telecom and banking. When the offshoring play runs out IT and telecom will go bust. That will leave banking and real estate to pick up the slack, because there is little to no manufacturing in India. In fact, there is more in next door Bangladesh.

Then again, because of global warming Bangladesh will be underwater, so maybe India can help the Bangladeshis move their manufacturing base uphill.
Oh, and on my pet infrastructure project: the railways? Absolutely no money has been put into them to modernize them. Yes, you can buy a ticket online now, but tell me, how does a farmer who has to shit in public afford the internet?

yes, India is a third world shithole, but hey, we're trying to improve (I think)

of all of our many troubles, religion is the biggest one.. fuking terrorist muslims and increasingly hateful hindus and stupid *** christians.. fuk them all, we should nuke varanasi, mecca and the vatican just to piss these people off

 

[nair]

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.

Well first of all, what ever you said in your post is true to a great extent, and every Indian here knows it far better than you or anyone else in this forum....... We may not agree here,we may fight it with every available resources, the simple reason for that is our "EGO"....... every such thread in this forum normally end up being a troll fest with chest thumping by others and turning it to a measuring contest.......

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of the ancillary ones.

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)

Now This is another grave problem I have traveled almost across India barring few states and the entire north east.... have also traveled in 6 countries, and i understand how serious this issue is....But things are changing, and changing very fast...... There was never an instance where govt has taken it this serious, even the PM taken it very seriously.... You could see the number of toilets build in last financial year and the kind of budget allocated to this issue in yesterday's budget..... Some how this littering is in our culture (or say in our way of our life)...... The entire singapore if you liter screwed, but go to little india and do what ever you want, no one will touch you , the world also acknowledge this.... Lot has been changed in this regard, and it will take time to come to the standards of developed nations.......Acknowledging this issue is the first step and i am glad that we have acknowledged it, we shall resolve this issue......

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older.Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.

Well this is another issue, but when compared to the first one, there has been lot of improvement on this parameters..... The highways are built across and roads are widened.... Flyovers are built...... More over this problem can be resolved much easily when compared..... All you need is money and planning...... With economy growing i am sure this will be resolved.......Now you speak about railways, True there is already an issue, and govt has noticed it, that is why there was no new train in this year budget and they are trying to improve the productivity of the railway...... Lot more need to be done on improving infrastructure, and that is also addressed in this year budget......Indian Railway is the most cheapest transport system in the world...... A passenger train (fast passenger) journey of 50 km may cost you close to 12 rupee (20 cents).... If the travel fare is low that means the income for development is also low...... It is a tricky scenario govt faces, if you increase the passenger fare there will huge hue and cry and the poor will get affected..... That is where the govt try to raise fund thru other sources, Indian Railway is soo huge that it will take decades to see a change in infra...... Yes we do buy weapons from them, and we buy lot of them..... Probably we are the only country in the world which shares boundaries with 2 nuclear weapon states and maintain a strained relation with them......

The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!

Now i agree we have a problem with our govt and bureaucracy...... Yes most of them are corrupted...... Well it will take time to eradicated corruption, it is one of the causes for the above 2 problems you mentioned..... We are making laws and attempts but at times the guys who are supposed to check the corruption are corrupt themselves..... Hope to see this coming down in days..... The new govt seems to be less corrupt compared to earlier one..... and most probably there will be lot of changes in this aspect too.....
Now you say it takes ages to get a sim connection, yes it takes..... and no one will here complain because we know that is needed, especially the kind of security thread India faces (both externally internally) we do not mind going thru this obstacles if it helps us to live safe......well when it comes to medical care, India is divided in to 3 sections...... 1) the poor who depends on govt hospitals, and god save them because of the state of those hospitals..... But surprisingly the treatments are way better there compared to the pvt hospitals...... 2) Middle class who depends on hospitals which are private, and they provide you better treatment at a higher cost 3) Rich who goes to hightech hospitals for even for a cold....It is not that we care, most of them think this is ok, or we use our famous lines "Chaltha hein" .....

It is a big country which has different problem..... In your post you mentioned "Kerala"..... I happened to be from that state, true that kerala is much better when compared on the aspects you mentioned, but we face far greater issues than others in certain sectors, Infra for example, probably we might have the narrowest national highway across country......

I always felt Accepting a problem is job half done......... and I have no shame in accepting the problems you mentioned.......

 

[acid rain]

"may you live in interesting times" - chinese proverb.

Indians do live in utter chaos..and somehow desire /relish / accustomed / have no choice for that.

 

[nair]

@sancho @scorpionx @levina @Chronos @SpArK @Abingdonboy @MilSpec can add to what i said.....

 

[OrionHunter]

there is little to no manufacturing in India. In fact, there is more in next door Bangladesh.

Then you don't know WTF you're talking about!

Next chapter - Make in India. Nuff said.

 

[nair]

So you have been to India to develop these views?

By the way as a Lucknowi who stayed there for quite a bit of time will tell you what I think are the principle problems are. Unemployment. Farmers committing suicide after every 40 minutes, lack of sanitary places and in Lucknow monkeys and cows roaming around as if they own the entire city. It is better in Delhi though (the wildlife). In my neighborhood there are so many cows, cow dung and dog shit left behind that the city can drown in it. The pavement too is brick, with the cow shit sticking around the edges of the brick where the mortar is. Other things are statistics like highest child mortality and large out of school population can also be taken into account.

India will always be there high on those numbers.... for the simple reason...... "Population"..... The inability of previous governments is the reason..... India started changing from 1990.... I have heard some one saying..... India can be discussed in two terms.... Before Manmohan and After Manmohan..... (though MMS screwed the economy he has build)..... That is where it started changing, and believe me the change is significant but we have a long way to go...... Touchwood it will happen.....

But the thing with Indians is they are a stubborn people. You ask them Modi conducted a genocide, they will say no no no constantly like malabhari voice mail. Go outside Andhra Pradesh courts to ask for justice, again no no no. Bhai they killed dozens of muslims ... the last answer for us muslims is "go to Pakistan" especially when they hear something they don't like.

Well this is where you go wrong.... You are going to people with a preconceived idea that modi has conducted a genocide and you get upset when people reply in negative....... There is no proof that Modi has done a genocide and none of the court has convicted him..... But then if you go and ask a congress worker, MIM worker, he will say he did, This is how politics played in India (but if we discuss it further we might derail the subect) Now here you make one more mistake. ie you look things at a religious angle...... You know there several section of society which lives in much worse condition than any of the muslims in entire India.....But assuming that they are the worst one, is absolutely nonsense.....Yes there are issues faced by muslims like any other sections..... But you will be surprised to learn they are the most pampered society when it comes to Indian politics......

But to the point I wanted to make. The Indians sometimes do what the government doesn't. Long ago when my father went to Delhi (he was born in Lucknow though) he noted one thing. The bias they had for muslims and perhaps a lot of others existed but there was a marvel on the streets. People had taken pickaxes, shovels and other equipment and were building a road by themselves- a road their inept government (ours is no exception) refused to build.

This is something which happens every now and then...... in the state i live every july and august people do this.... after monsoon most of the roads would be filled with potholes and 24/7 channels use this to criticize the govt constructively.....

When I heard of this I wanted to replicate this in Pakistan. Possibly the city I very recently was in. But I want to see this kind of reaction. We were victims of Indian terrorism which made us escape. Now we have exactly an even worse type of terrorism in Pakistan. We wanted to escape fanaticism, All Forms Of It.

This is where the difference comes.... You still believe the hypothetical "Indian terrorism" and believe that you were victims of "Indian Terrorism" (it makes me laugh though) and we used to blame every act happened in India to ISI and pakistan before.... Oflate there is a sense in our agencies and govt that there is nothing much we can do about it, and what we need to do it internally need to be done..... and slowly and steadily that is giving us results and number of terrorist acts has come down significantly..... Where in your case you still believe the myth of "Indian terrorism" and not able to come out because you haven't understood the actual problem.....If you had to escape from it, you need understand the route cause of it which might not be "Indian Terrorism"

 

[SpArK]

I totally acknowledge and agree to the title and most of whats written in the Opening Post.

This article was published in 2009 , 6 years ago in a blog by sean paul kelley.

Yes we do have problems, that may be the reason why Indians are more political and they follow their politics badly, hoping for a change.

I have noticed there are a few highlighted issues being put forwarded like Pollution, Infrastructure and Bureaucracy and Corruption.

Lets take each problem in the scanner and analyse where its going into.

Pollution

Indians are among the most laziest when its about to keep their surroundings clean. You will find most Indians to keep the homes neat and tidy but care less about what happens outside.

The lack of well structured garbage collection, garbage conversion, garbage management of most City corporations , town Municipalities or Village Panchayats add to this dilemma.

A large majority of Indias geography is still in last century when it comes about sanitation and for them the open fields and water bodies like lakes, rivers and sea are areas to dumb their wastes.

Sean, even when you write praises about my state Kerala, i still believe it has its own problems. The Tourist destinations are not plastic and litter free.


Pollution, Sanitation, natural resource management issues will takesome time to rectify .

The sanitation and pollution issues where sparked lately with the issue taken up in parliaments and the Government have made it a priority to address it by construction of toilets in urban and rural areas and giving grands and loans with subsidies to people who intend to build toilets at their home.

We are fast moving towards addressing this issue and the results so far is promising.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan: Government builds 7.1 lakh toilets in January - Economic Times



Now the second issue of Infrastructure.


A lot has changed from what was there in 2008-2009.

The long distance travel nowadays through national highways is much much different from what it has been 7 years back.

Subways, Metros , Monorails are getting operational and are getting completed and Government has initiated steps to modernise the world's largest rail networks in the recent budget too.

Even remote areas in borders and remote states are getting better connectivity.

So the progress is going good.


Now into Corruption and Bureaucracy.

Its true, we have witnessed lots of corruption in our national, state levels and have seen politicians getting away with lots of money. Thankfully things have been on positive in this area and blackmoney and corruption charges have came down drastically since the new government has taken over.

Now the main focus is upon bringing back the money amassed through corruption and we are progressing well on that.

Bureaucracy has been an issue and its been a headache for individuals and for investors to start and sustain business in India. By cutting off bottlenecks the scenario has started to change slowly and we are expecting a lot of investors in most sectors and even the opposition agrees that government is investor/corporate/business friendly, even though their motive is to say govt is not friendly with poor, but thats another debate which is not required here.

The 2009 Blog is out sync when it comes to growth rates and many other things hence doesnt require explanations from me.

In short , this travel blog from 2009 has lots of truths,which we already acknowledge and have initiated the corrective measures on.

 

[Windjammer]

Albeit most countries of the subcontinent suffer from similar problems, however the tragedy with India is that many initiatives seem to be just stage managed for publicity and attention. Take the clean India campaign launched by the Indian PM, in many cases, rubbish was deliberately dumped on the streets so the politicians could gain that photo opportunity.

Garbage dumped for Delhi BJP chief to clean? Congress says incident mockery of cleanliness campaign

 

[nair]

Albeit most countries of the subcontinent suffer from similar problems, however the tragedy with India is that many initiatives seem to be just stage managed for publicity and attention. Take the clean India campaign launched by the Indian PM, in many cases, rubbish was deliberately dumped on the streets so the politicians could gain that photo opportunity.

Garbage dumped for Delhi BJP chief to clean? Congress says incident mockery of cleanliness campaign

Though it might be true, but believe me i was one of incident...... and the awareness created by this motion is huge..... That is more important...... The politics will be played between BJP and Congress...... but these days normal population is growing above political differences....

 

[acetophenol]

Stay at home, don't come to India, problemo solved!

 

[Sam.]

Well I admit. I was even born in Islamabad. But I have cultural links to Lucknow as both my parents were born there. Who cares anyway. If you see any problems with India share them. Thats what this thread is for. Duh.

The author also makes some valid statements. A nation cannot develop until it takes its minorities along with it. There are other points made too. Some are like a fat round pill, hard to swallow but useful if digested.

No i refuse this, we don't need to carry anyone but from my point of view you just need to create opportunity for everyone and it's up to anyone or everyone to grab them.

India does that and no India won;t devop if muslim ,hindu,sikh,jain etc will develop but India will develop when Indians will develop so please have your minority appeasement to yourself and put in motion in Pakistan so they can develop for the sake of our side of the world.

 

[Bobby]

look who is talking about pollution and corruption

 

[Koovie]

I have returned to India after living in US for 25 years and I am frustrated to see filth and garbage strewn on streets. Sometimes I feel that we Indians don't know how to keep our neighbourhoods clean. All of the issues that you have mentioned can be solved in one to two decades if govt. is focused and people are educated about it.

Law and order is not followed in general. People are allowed to set up shops on footpaths and people have to walk on streets.

Most of the problems stem from massive corruption in govt. institutions and politicians ignore this reality. No accountability is assigned to government staff if they fail in completing the tasks. Unless you go in person to complain and follow up, these government staff will just ignore your complaint.

Most people in India do not care about clean roads, or having a working sewage system, or having basic sanitation, or giving way to an ambulance rushing a critically unstable patient to a hospital........

But they do care for their ancient books and scriptures, they do care about the person you sleep with in your bedroom, they do care about forcing children into specific educational/professional paths without even considering the talents and interests of the child...

 

[my2cents]

Most people in India do not care about clean roads, or having a working sewage system, or having basic sanitation, or giving way to an ambulance rushing a critically unstable patient to a hospital........

But they do care for their ancient books and scriptures, they do care about the person you sleep with in your bedroom, they do care about forcing children into specific educational/professional paths without even considering the talents and interests of the child...

It is not that they don't care but they are not properly trained at home or at school. Education is the key.