Wait! Slums in India have cell phone service but neither toliets nor running water. Isn’t that development in reverse? Of course, what do you expect given that the market provides cell phones and government toilets and water?
“[India] is a country buoyed by a vibrant business world of call centers and software developers, but hamstrung by a bloated, corrupt government that has failed to deliver the barest of services.”
And there is no reason to complain to the cell phone company — it isn’t their fault.
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The solution, of course, is to ban cell phone companies. Oh, and appoint a government committee to commission research into why there are no toilets.
If they have money to buy cell phones when they don’t have running water then they obviously aren’t being taxed enough!
it doesnt sound like development in reverse. maybe communication is more important than the plumbing…they have done without the plumbing for a long time and still survive. maybe its cultural??
Cholera is a horrible culture.
*ba-dum-ching*
have they had regular phone service for several years??
Development in reverse? More like a gang of clowns, thieves, and idiots is creating a problem that wouldn’t exist if they just went away and the market was allowed to work.
My question is why is there a “water mafia”? There must be some kind of prohibition or price controls going on that are producing the shortage and the black market. Does anyone have more information on the water market in India?
Water supply in India is completely controlled by government. While there are private water suppliers, they are restricted to supplying water in bubble-top cans and bottles and through trucks. Piped water supply is a complete government monopoly.
Just to take the example of the city I live in, Chennai, it is a city that suffers from chronic water shortages. At the same time, it has a long coastline (with the 2nd longest beach in the world), which means that desalination is clearly a technically (and I believe economically as well) feasible option. However, for the last 20 years, there is just talk of setting up a desalination plant and no action simply because the political class owns a lot of water-carrier trucks and they know that the year water scarcity strikes, they can make a killing supplying water to one and all (at really exorbitant prices made possible by the scarcity that is their own creation). Even in normal times, there are enough portions of the city that do not have piped water supply and are dependent on these very trucks (owned by the same politicians and their cronies) to get their daily water.
I hope this explains the situation.
I remember when the telecom sector was also a government monopoly in India. The first phone we got took us 5 years. That was the early 1980s, we did it strictly by the book. The second phone we got took us three months. By then it was still a public sector monopoly, but the government began contracting to private firms for maintaining the exchanges and there was some efficiency trickling in. But we still needed some help from the inside. That was the early 1990s.
There was no wait time for the third phone. By then the private sector was more or less running the show. So telecom firms where going door to door selling attractive services at competing prices. That was around the 2000s.
Millions and millions of people in India and most do not know about the classical liberalism tradition. They have the numbers to easily overwhelm the minority that controls them but are impotent because they do not know the power of their own subjectivism.
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