I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Some of these graphs are highly inaccurate due to how the government skews employment data. For example, the government counts jobless people as "employed" if they return to their villages from cities due to lack of employment and occasionally help on family farms.
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »).
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Eggs are an outstanding source of protein, culturally well-known, easy to transport, cook, etc.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
> INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
These metrics are there to measure progress, and the progress is real and happening. My dad was born in 1951 in a village in neighboring Bangladesh. When he was a kid, over 30% of kids died before age 5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072376/child-mortality-.... This was an improvement compared to 50 years before that, when the under-5 mortality rate was about half (which was about the same as in pre-industrial Europe). Today, the under 5 mortality rate is only 3%. Still higher than the sub-1% of the U.S., but similar to what it was in the U.S. in 1951 at the same time my dad was born.
This sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric.
On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
I always had to think of my grandparents when discussing GDP. Aside from being very much part of the regular economy, they were also quite self sufficient. When my grandmother died, we found rows and rows of bottled jam. Some decades old according to the labels. My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. To the GDP that whole side of life is invisible. But it makes a big different in terms of resiliency when disaster hits. I'm assuming it was a reaction to WW2 or maybe it just is what people always did. I'm guessing that a lot of people in India are quite self sufficient (although I wouldn't know) so the financialization of every day life and resulting gdp growth is indeed a flawed indicator.
Nah it's not a WW2 thing. Not sure about Western Europe but in Central/Eastern Europe, especially in rural areas, people still have chambers and basements full of jam, compote and basically anything else which can be preserved. Not one or two jars but enough to last several years, that kind of stuff.
Valuing self-sufficiency over dollar efficiency or even time efficiency is not dead.
I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.
> My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually.
Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest.
Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
Also: anything relating to home cooking, exercise, self-care, relationships and caring for children and other relatives. Only "paid professional" services are counted which are often much worse quality than the organic untaxed real thing.
> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.
(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
Interesting. So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional, paid by people who enjoy the food, you would be at least sceptical, when it comes to quality?
I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)
If that person makes a home-cooked meal for their family, no doubt adding value to the world, the value added is not counted towards GDP. Only the "money (or something else taxable) changing hands" transactions are counted.
"So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional," - do you typically know all that about the people who staff the restaurants you visit? And do you think it is the case?
I can say that I would rather visit my friends and have a homecooked meal over a restaurant visit any day of the week. There is an intangible value to the combination of food and personal relationships.
For babysitting it's obviously better for the children to be with their family instead of "cared for" by the first stranger that accepts the lowest wage.
>This sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric.
Poverty levels are measured with PPP dollars, so that's already factored in.
That's only an issue if you use nationwide metrics to make local comparisons (eg. are new yorkers richer than people in Kolkata?), but if you're comparing the entire country it's fine.
That's correct but my point is what kind of poverty is the poverty line measuring if it does not take into account how much people are getting to eat. This access to PPP adjusted dollar amount is clearly not a good heuristic for it because somehow extreme poverty has been alleviated while having a hunger index worse than North Korea.
If you want to reduce poverty it's handy to have some metrics. Obviously it's a simplification of reality but you can't really track all 8bn people individually to see how they are doing.
> Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
The Lancet suggests that the difference between very poor nutrition and great nutrition adds up to roughly 8 inches (20cm) of adult height. Height remains very genetically heritable, aside from that.
You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
My parents were both upper class in Bangladesh (so a rich diet in fish, meat, etc.) and I'm 3" taller than my dad (moved to US at 5) and my brother is 5" taller (born in US).
>>We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry.
Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal).
Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai).
Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010).
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
Your first link says that it measures calories available and not calories consumed. It links to an undernourishment metric instead the world average for it has remained about the same for about a decade. I am not expert and I am probably cherry picking the page that matches my bias but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
The usual claim is that the people who are involved do have power to effect policies (mostly by deciding what to throw money at I think), and that that's where they meet to bounce ideas off eachother and generally get all on the same page.
It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
The point is to get a sense of progress or not. It only creates a sense of progress if there actually is some.
The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear.
What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
> The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachievable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
This shows you don’t know what extreme poverty is and how horrible it is.
What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing.
Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
The criticisms against charity and progress seem to be politically motivated. Human suffering can be used as a commodity to influence elections or promote specific ideologies. If you start measuring the suffering and show progress, you take away their commodity and thus become a threat. I.e. "how dare you say you're improving? There's still plenty of suffering going on". This position is a shift from continuous scale to simple binary thinking. At which point, anyone without new clothes and an air conditioned SUV is "poor".
India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness.
Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.
Anecdote alert: I travel to India at least once in a year and I have to take the train each time (sleeper class) and I can definitely attest that things have significantly improved since I was a kid. I have been taking these same trains for over 25 years now. For starters the toilets actually don't dump directly between the tracks. The railway employees seem to be quite happy and take pride in their job (they used to always have depressing faces when I was growing up).
Another anecdote : If 20 years ago you took a flight that goes to India, you would be frustrated with the condition of the toilets. It was so bad I used to avoid Indian carriers just because of that and intentionally take a layover in Europe so at least part of the flying experience would be cleaner. These days I don't feel that way, I find flights to India pretty much the same as any other flights.
That said, there is still a LOT to be done, but I think overall people do seem to care about hygiene more than they used to years ago. Also, assuming there is always a certain percentage of population that will never care about this (in any country) it is bound to look a bit worse in India due to the higher population density.
There were literal hills of rotting organic garbage inside the slums. With children living next to them.
I had visions of Paul Ehrlich freaking out at the sight of people defecating and bathing on the roadside in Delhi.
I saw photos of some of the "mohalla clinics" (free basic healthcare clinics) that the previous Delhi government had (admittedly admirably) set up. Some of them looked so dirty and structurally unsound that they wouldn't be allowed to function as holding pens for farm animals in the US.
In the US, we have companies like Waste Management handle our waste. Surprises me that India doesn't have a dozen Waste Managements by now. Billion dollar unicorns/startups/whatever, innovating in turning "waste to wealth" (as Nitin Gadkari calls it). Put capitalism to use where there's a failure of non-capitalism to solve the problem. But there might be deep cultural issues. I suspect the caste system plays a part. The forward castes believe that trash management is beneath them.
One issue is the unfortunate deep level of corruption in Indian society.
If people create many waste management companies and people tried to invest in them then some people would just create fake companies and simply steal the money. There’s no trust.
Or at least that’s the way it used to be decades prior. Your suggestion nowadays might actually work because the Indian government has now identification measures for every Indian citizen. And other new technologies and enforcement which make this type of corruption more easier to eliminate.
But the deep seated cultural perceptions of dishonesty and endemic corruption from the past will continue for many years unfortunately.
Hopefully one day India can become the kind of place you are suggesting.
>>One issue is the unfortunate deep level of corruption in Indian society.
Blame every thing on "Corruption". This is such cope.
All you have to do is ensure you do your part in keeping things around you clean. You can ghost walk streets in the poorest places in Mexico and they look affluent compared to even posh neighbourhoods in India.
Lets call it as it is, We Indians need to seriously address our cultural tendencies. Im not just talking about some immediate sense of urgency. But how we go about living our every day life. Unless you address this at a core level, and create a proactive sense of awareness about hygiene in people this isn't going to change.
I think with a big enough governmental and cultural push, you could. Something like the white feather campaign, or the various “help the war by doing x” things that happened in WW2.
Honestly, they should really make it a priority. The awareness of what India is like has severely hurt their international reputation.
There was a recent scandal involving someone spitting paan/chewing tobacco on the floor inside one of the state assemblies.
A video I watched of a brand spanking new metro station in Mumbai. Marble floors and all. And a commenter pointed out a timestamp where you can see paan/chewing tobacco spit in a corner of the floor.
Here's what baffles me. It is well established that Indians chew paan/chewing tobacco. It is well established that they then spit these out. Why don't they have spitoons installed inside the state assembly or metro stations? Treat it as a cultural opportunity: create beautiful spitoons with culturally relevant designs on them. The type kings used to have in their courts. And have them sponsored by businesses (i.e. let them post digital banner ads on them). Enlightened capitalism!
Better yet would be to ban the practice entirely; spittoons in the US (think generic wild west saloons) were a major source of spreading diseases like tuberculosis. They (and chewing tobacco) went out of fashion in the '30's due to shifting perceptions of hygiene, and both chewing gum and cigarettes becoming the more favorable options. I'm not sure how much campaigning was done to achieve that though.
"The Ugly Indian" [1] (a ragtag group of anonymous citizens) usually does that in India. In reality, though, these kinds of issues are only really seen as a minor inconvenience at most. Anecdotally, most middle-class people in here frown upon chewing tobacco, so I assume the government thinks that as long as they keep it relatively clean, nobody would think of dirtying it with their paan stains.
The term "racist" lost its pedantic meaning long ago. From the current Oxford Dictionary of English:
racism
/ˈreɪsɪz(ə)m/
noun
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
Nearly all of India is poor. If you step out of major metros, that is as little as 30 - 40 kms from major metros you will see never ending poverty.
Job options are non existent. Farming and some local trade is all you have. There is also total absence of health care infrastructure. Most people have to travel to metros for healthcare. Last time I visited a small town in my weekend motorcycle rides to see my former manager, the biggest political issue in the town was wanting a kidney speciality hospital built. It turns out taking a day off(loss of earnings), traveling to Bangalore, spending money and time for dialysis was bankrupting entire family trees. Similar situations exist for bypass surgeries, and getting stent installed in heart. You will hear these stories for all kinds of major ailments.
Options for schooling and cram schools are absent. Your kids don't get a competitive peer group, or decent enough tuition/coaching to compete with students from metros, and once you lose your chance to study engineering/medicine its just one more generation of poverty your bloodline has to endure.
In the metros, if you have the money you get good hospital and schools. But owning a home is nearly impossible these days. By and large if you don't make it to FAANG in a few years, you just leave and move abroad.
Nearly every young person I know doesn't even try and default goal is either Gulf or Jobs in western countries.
In short, its a brutal Zero sum game, everybody grabs whatever they can, by any means they can, even if they have to burn down the whole thing in the process.
Watched videos, seeing photos... you should travel a bit more IMHO. Not everything is quickly solvable by 'billion dollar startup' mentality. Understand their culture and history a bit, where they are coming from and where they as society go, realistic limits and so on.
Are you sure? Having lived all across the country (and currently in Mumbai), I haven't seen any progress on that part since at least the last half decade.
The "Swacch Bharat" campaign that was launched more than a decade ago only gave some short-lived upgrades to public places.
There was no momentum. People never started, it was more of a marketing campaign.
Almost everyday I see people throw garbage around street corners, if you ask them not to, they gang up and go after you like its their birth right to be dirty and you are being evil by keeping clean.
You need to tear down the whole shebang and rebuild it from scratch, much of this also about income levels of the ordinary Indian, and being so poor, keeping clean isn't any where in the list of priorities.
Theory (I live half a world away though): totalitarianism. China has a very strong and top-down government, where if the leadership decides for example that streets should be clean, millions of government officials make it happen. I don't know if that is just good organization or if it's backed by e.g. legal repercussions if it's not done right though.
But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.
The TLDR is competent dictatorship and normalization (really cooperation) with hegemon (US) made rapid export led growth work. The dictator sets up the industries, the hegemon consumes the outputs. Need both, transition away from authoritarian is optional though (especially resource exporters that hegemon needs).
Democracies to my knowledge has been incapable of bootstrapping the 0-1 agrarian -> industrial development fast. I can't really think of one that didn't industrialize from exploitation/colonial phase prior to democratizing.
India hindered by being "real" democracy with universal sufferage at the outset while being very multicultural. It's... very helpful for development to culturally genocide society into relative monoculture. You want that migrant country girl from Z village to be fungible cog in factory Y, and you start that by making sure everyone can interact with language Z.
And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family).
If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India.
And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities.
My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer.
A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppressing videos that show litter on the streets than a video of a woman slowly running over a child, putting her car in reverse and running over them again, all while people walk by and pretend they don't see it happen?
The lack of help from bystanders is/was due to some strange liability doctrine that assisting can/could make you liable for damages. This is fairly old information though so hopefully it has changed.
Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
> China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad
they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally
they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they
a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy.
b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade.
c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost.
Despite the pragmatism in economics and trade, China is firmly authoritarian and under the control of the CCCP.
You can read professor Vivek Chibbers book "locked in place". I highly recommend it (any book of his actually). It's an account of why India's economy was and still is an utter failure.
China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?
It was liberalization in addition to strong and relatively benevolent enforcement of the market.
Just allowing the existence of private enterprise doesn't mean much when institutions are weak or corrupt. If you know everyone isn't playing by the rules, the most you can accomplish is rent-seeking while everyone tries to make each other suckers.
If all you have is a strong ML-style government and no liberalization, however, then there's not much of a point in finding opportunities to invest because everything you have is at the mercy of the Party.
China succeeded because investors gambled correctly that liberalization would be accompanied by credible governance, and it can all go away if and when the credibility for investors and entrepreneurs is replaced by Xi's neo-Maoism.
It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. Far poorer than even China.
In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war.
All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today.
Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say.
You'll love the book then. Chibber compares India's path to South Korea and Taiwan, and why liberalization wasn't "the" key ingredient, but certainly one of the important ones
>>It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth.
In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education.
To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen.
The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate?
You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.
> India's economy was and still is an utter failure.
It's currently an "utter failure"? I only know how to read Wikipedia, and that tells me it's the 5th largest economy in the world and currently growing faster than China. Of course it's still very poor per-capita but "utter failure" paints a very different picture.
> China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness
Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different.
In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government.
In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization.
That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics).
Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
>>urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
That is because citizens themselves don't care.
Single biggest motivation of the Indian voter base is using the process of elections and then elected politician like attack dogs to hurt the people they hate(Often minorities). This is through and through. This manifests along the lines of religion and caste, mostly. But regionalism and language politics has played its part in the past. But in the past few decades its mostly religion.
Every time a political party does something good, anything good. Especially uniformly for the masses, they are voted out. This is because in a country like India, people don't want things to uniformly improve for everyone. The goal is always for your(community) to have an edge, while everybody else must be made to suffer. Any other arrangement and the masses feel their favorite politicians didn't hurt the people they hate enough.
>>That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years.
Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka, has gotten significantly dirtier, garbage littered and both dusty and polluted in the past decades.
>>Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore
Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
This isn't about citizens. Fundamentally, residents in a mega-city like Bangalore simply do not matter in a parliamentary democracy like Karnataka. Bangalore doesn't make you CM, so there's no incentive for Karnataka's politicians to invest in it.
> Every time a political party
Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy. INC, BJP, JDS, etc can win elections, but local government such as public works are apolitical. The issue is states in India do NOT devolve planning commissions to local government - just about every function that a city would have (Zoning, Permitting, Land Acquisition) are managed by state level planning commissions. India is unique in the level of centralization that state level governments have.
> Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka
Karnataka is not the rest of India. Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management. The fact that much poorer Indore can outcompete Bangalore in cleanliness and urban management is a testament to the fact that it's about local government.
Also, ime, Delhi NCR (not just Delhi and Noida but also ancillary towns like Kurkushetra and Karnal), Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Coimbatore have all steadily gotten much better over the past 10 years. Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
> Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
These are multi-million person cities with populations similar to Bangalore barely 10-15 years ago, yet they are still cleaner and better managed than Bangalore circa 2010.
While population does play a role, Karnataka is unique in that the JDS admin in the 1990s removed almost all urban governance responsibilities from Bangalore and moved it to either the State Commission (eg. zoning) or privatized (eg. garbage collection - but this was because of the World Bank).
Central planning and authoritarianism can be very effective at changing the course of an organization, government, or country; once the choice is made.
What they don't always do well is make the choice to change when conditions change. There's also usually a limited bandwidth for deciding and forcing change, so you tend to end up without economic diversity and without great results in areas outside of policy.
A democratic/distributed decision making process tends towards slower changes and less alignment, but more diversity.
If you decide to be the world's production line, economic diversity may be less important. But having diversity is usually a good thing when economic tides change.
Central planning is very good for pulling a country out of an a poorly developed state into a highly developed state. The USSR experience this under Stalin (setting aside that he was a mass murderer) which created an industrial power. Even in the US, during WW2 the industry was centrally planned and that pulled the US out of the Great Depression.
However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.
The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.
India has similar barriers for foreign manufacturing businesses to enter as those that China has.
And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end.
The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
I think the caste aspect makes sense in terms of who a politician feels responsible for when they are in power. For example, typical upper caste politician might feel that they only need to improve the conditions of upper caste people while not feeling responsible for people in lower castes, or just people who are poor in general. I think sentiments like that is prevalent across politics in India, though I agree about there being no solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities.
A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0].
And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1]
> state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality
These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly).
It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2]
The OBC/SC/ST plurality has been the norm in Indian politics since the 1980s.
China and India only began to diverge in the late 2000s to early 2010s, and much of that is due to China's investment in urban construction and real estate, while India's economy entered a lost decade due to a loan origination crisis.
India did a fork in its flavor of politics in the 1980s. The goals went from making a industrial state, with a big middle class, with health care, housing, decent working hours and retirement -to- making politics whose goals were restoring cultural-religious pride and history revisionism.
There was total chaos through 1980s and 1990s, governments would come and go without outright majority without much progress on the economic front. Only exception was being at the right time and place for the outsourcing boom. But its effects were limited to a few cities and groups of people.
There was some correction in 2000s, but it does look like making a affluent industrial economy is neither the goal of the political class or the electoral section.
> And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities.
Hyperlocal corruption/nobility is the worst kind of corruption/nobility.
Non-local ones will at least create systems that work, supporting infrastructure, and will try to maintain some amount of material wealth that they can prey upon.
> The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
China very specifically and deliberately set out to build up its export capability in a way that was highly centralized and consolidated (specifically around the Yangtze Delta), whereby entire supply chains were located next to each, lowering the cost of production and making it difficult for other countries to compete even if they had lower wages. This was not by accident.
The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root.
Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).
The article is interesting, the headline is baffling. It seems to be claiming that it is possible to pay Indians a medium-single-figure daily wage (ie, $1,000/year) despite having 40% of the country working in the agricultural industry.
Great but that myth is and was of no real interest to anyone and isn't a very useful frame for the article. India still needs to move most of the population on to doing something more productive than inefficiently looking after plants. The goal is not 1 billion people living off slightly more than $1,000/year. The goal is living standards at least an order of magnitude higher if not several orders. That requires capital, not subsistence+ farming. Which, to their credit, is what the Indians seem to be focusing on.
Might be a better life than smelling exhaust gas and looking at screens for 3/4 of our existence. Then wake up and worry about AI eventually eating our jobs.
I take looking at screens in an office over breathing exhaust gases and pesticides any day. Working on a farm is hard work even in developed countries.
By the time most of India is at the level of development that their problem is looking at screens, the cars will be battery-electric.
AI has as much chance of taking your job as combine harvesters have of taking everyone's job that currently has one in India working on farms: 99%, maybe, but also 0%.
This is wonderful news and a framework for other countries to accomplish the same. I sensed the US’ “peacekeeping” role (I know, I know) and foreign aid spending has helped much of the global south reduce extreme poverty since the 80s. That doesn’t mean people’s lives are especially comfortable but it’s an upgrade. I think historically that will be US’ largest impact, and we are unlikely to accomplish anything as significant again. I don’t mean to imply US always did a respectable or honorable job in this role (I didn’t forget what the ford and Rockefeller foundations did)
Now that the US seems intent on burning every international aid project we have, I hope other countries can help fill the gap and help lift other poor countries a little higher. It seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Even if it is neglible, it is still millions of people. Plus if industrial miracle, so to say, had been allowed to happen, this might have happened much sooner. And this country is yet to deal with the massive impact that potential impacts that AI could have on it econcomy.
I do think labor in India will be cheaper than using any AI for quite some time longer than in the West.
I also worry that the major negative effects of AI in India will not be economic but will be social as the society is extremely low trust at the moment due to widespread corruption, criminals being lauded by the government, killings of journalists, communal tensions, huge pollution, and tons of other problems.
I'd say huge investments in improving things like infrastructure (roads, water, sewage, electricity), quality of housing, etc. China has a lot of experience in this regard with huge, admittedly failed projects of building entire cities from scratch (failed because nobody actually lives there).
>China has a lot of experience in this regard with huge, admittedly failed projects of building entire cities from scratch (failed because nobody actually lives there).
>Although a feature of discourse on the Chinese economy and urbanization in China in the 2010s, many developments that were initially criticized as "ghost cities" in China have since become occupied and are now functioning cities.[5][6][7][8]
While I admit to not having been able to read the article, this is very true. In my country, everyone has access to free healthcare, housing, food, and even tertiary education for most people, especially the poorest. But there are still endless complaints about poverty. Sometimes a person will have to live in a (free) hotel because all the immediately available free housing is in another city where they don't want to live despite being still perfectly well developed and comfortable.
We'll never get rid of poverty because people keep raising the bar no matter how wealthy they get.
Raising the bar is good but there are people who will exploit the feelings of people who perceive to be disenfranchised (and will cherry-pick some aspects where they are really worse off now compared to the past) and they will inflate their anger and may lead to destroying the actual progress that has been made.
We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life. No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
Being a rich person in the renaissance period seems like it'd be nice if you only look at paintings glorifying the lifestyle. But when you sit down and think about the nitty gritty daily life, it would suck compared to an average modern lifestyle. Yet the rich back then were surely quite comfortable, just like the rich today are. And the rich centuries from now will look at the mega rich today and be amazed that they lived such quaint lives without food teleporters and instant cancer zappers and weekend trips to the balmy shores of Ganymede.
Saying the poor can't be dissatisfied with the inequality in society today because "things were worse in the past for the poor" can really be extended to anyone and anything. There's always something in the past that was worse than a typical bad experience today. But the past is full of horrors that we should learn from and not repeat.
Have you ever been in a castle? Thermal mass is highly underestimated from my experience.
I suggest the likes of Foix in warm southern france in the peak of summer.
Walking into one of the lower rooms where the doors are wide open and such is like walking into a fridge.
> No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
I think this is greatly exaggerated. Actual royalty had access to vast amounts of physical and mental labor that only the billionaires of modern society could rival.
No A/C? You can pay people to bring ice into your house and cool you. No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that. Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
Modern world has conveniences, but so many people cannot afford any labor at all. Royalty had leisure time that most modern people can barely afford.
Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You're possibly dead from malaria, and no doctor can treat you. (People still die today, but you're much, much more likely to survive) Get syphilis? Your body is going to slowly rot away. Having a kid? Better have a few backups, because even the children of the rich dropped like flies.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.
The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.
> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?
An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.
> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.
Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.
> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.
It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.
What other mode of transport did you have? ships was all. even if you used an oxcart (not a horse - they eat too much for this work) it was slow.
okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.
>No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that.
...and die 2 weeks later from an infection because antibiotics haven't been discovered yet
>Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
The lack of air freight means even if you can send some guy to get it, by the time it arrives it'll be rotten.
The UK is infamous for housing illegal immigrants in hotels, and they don't just get free food but free money, too. Oh, and free healthcare.
Free money, housing, and healthcare for everyone is also the law here in Germany, which is why we get flooded by illegal immigrants too..
..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing. You can only afford something like this if your population overwhelmingly consists of educated, skilled people with a strong work ethic who would never voluntarily sign up for welfare. Once you allow millions of foreigners into the country who are neither educated nor skilled nor have a work ethic such systems start to collapse.
> ..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing.
No, it's not. The weight of illegals on the welfare system is a rounding error compared to the effects of an aging population.
And if you were familiar with people in this situation rather than spitting out far-right talking points you'd know that's it's not an enviable situation and not one they yearn to stay in.
So then why do millions come to the US to work backbreaking jobs in the agriculture or construction sector risking deportation and receiving no such benefits? It turns out the greatest economic impetus for migration is not available social services but available work of better pay. Same reasons why software engineers flock to the coasts. You see migration into Germany because literally all of south and eastern and the poorer parts of western europe are clamoring for finding work in Germany. And of course also middle easterners and africans, which the right wing media seems to fixate almost exclusively and not the constant flow of slavic people doing the same for the same reasons, probably owing to skin color and religion and the ease of slanting rhetoric along those lines for propaganda purposes for the bigots of the right wing base.
They get not only free housing, but also free food and even a janitor! That’s better than significant part of the population does. Do you think, that delivery driver or a nurse can afford more?
I don't think asylum seekers are typically considered illegal immigrants. I think that's more individuals who either don't seek legal status, or have tried to get a legal status but failed and stayed in the country anyway.
And I don't think Sweden and Germany are giving free housing to individuals that overstayed their visas.
All the free claims of facilities here ONLY exists to support corruption. These free things are not materially helping poor people hence everyone seems to be unhappy. For example, in India it takes almost $700k per km of road construct while in the US, it takes only $120k per km to construct the road.
And when it comes to other attributes like quality of the road, speed of the construction or durability of the road.... It's far worst than the USA.
All the Indian govt programs only exists to support their corrupt contractors and not for helping people genuinely.
There seems to be some discussion about how this can be squared with the actual reality of poverty in India as perceived by people who live or visit there. One thing to consider is that the work (or similar recent work) by Bhalla and Bhassin that underlies this claim has been strongly criticized for using unrealistic poverty benchmarks:
I'm no expert, but I have a feeling that the poverty line is not correct.
I know this is anecdotal, but I visited nine cities in India last year (including New Delhi), and the sidewalks were full of homeless people. At night, it was literally hard to walk through some areas because people were sleeping everywhere in the streets.
I've never seen anything like that in the US or Europe.
Before British rule India had one of the highest GDPs in the world, it became impoverished after the loot and famines of British rule. Then it had 60+ years of corrupt and stagnant rule, in the last decade or so the people have had enough and are now voting in people only who believe in development. This is what you are seeing in this data.
> so the people have had enough and are now voting in people only who believe in development. This is what you are seeing in this data.
It is a strong reason why people praise the current Indian ruling government ive noticed both among poor masses, middle class and elite, so you’re correct.
But they and the opposition all win elections there primarily on freebies, whichever party promises freebies wins in most parts of India.
It’s just that people are more confident on freebies coming to them, if they vote the party in their province/state if the party is also ruling at the central level, since taxes are passed from centre to state, especially in the last 10 years with introduction of GST, etc.
So yea, it is much more mixed, that just that reason, not to mention, first past the post, and uneven population sizes across different states, also change matters a lot.
i dont understand how the minimum non taxable income is 12 lakhs per annum (~10000 GBP) when a generous daily wage is like 1000 rupees (~10 GBP) a day.
India’s economy is based on Domestic consumption instead of exports.
If you tax its middle class (which is people above that income).
Then consumption tanks entirely,
They used to tax from a much lower rate at 7lakhs per annum and it was actively crushing their domestic consumption markets.
They’ve been trying to revive and boost their declining consumption economy.
India’s 10% population drives >50% of entire consumption, >80% of entire retail goods consumption outside of base essential commodities.
“According to the 2023 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 111th out of 125 countries, with a score of 28.7, indicating a “serious” level of hunger. Although this is a slight improvement from its 2015 score of 29.2, the progress has been slow compared to countries with similar economic growth rates. India also has the highest child wasting rate in the world at 18.7%. And 35.5% of children under five are medically listed as having their growth stunted, a condition that leads to long-term developmental complications.”
I would urge you to watch a statistical debunking of these so-called "global goodness" metrics. Sanjeev Sanyal does a good job of it [1],[2],[3]
Multiple organization(s) that manage such indices are, turns out, funded by the same cabal who want to concoct a narrative. They are not unbiased.
Three significant figures for a somewhat rough measurement of poverty over a sample of a population as diverse as India should have one's BS alarms blaring.
It makes it harder (impossible even) to take precise measurements deep into the decimal places if you have massive contours in the very thing (wealth) you are trying to measure with just one scalar number.
Diversity is not meant in the modern political interpretation.
As an less triggering exercise: try record in a single number the temperature - and change - of a large geographically diverse place like Australia - which has deserts and forests and is also subject to large periodic fluctuations like el Niño/la Niña.
I submit that you would be embarrassed to say it went from 28,7°C to 29,2°C and think it meant anything.
The misuse (and misunderstanding) of significant figures (let alone averages) is rampant in the social sciences. To the disadvantage of the folk we are all trying to help.
If the mean rolling average of all tempreture readings across Australia moved by 0.5 across a twelve month period that would indeed be a significant change that would certainly mean something.
Luckily the Australian BOM Weather Station specifications require that air and soil temp sensors have a -60° C to +60° C range with a 0.1° C resolution and a ±0.1° C accuracy.
The specs are in attachment 2 of the BoM Observation Specification manual.
Spurious comments are easy, looking stuff up is tough.
The Central Limit Theorem smooths any errors. Decades of observation data make instrument errors very easy to spot.
In recent decades daily MODIS (satellite) polar orbit overpasses provide air column and ground temp data that infills station data (from 1900 onwards).
There's a science to ground truthing, error detection, and data correction.
Only sometimes. It is easier to measure in cities, and thus introduce bias based on whatever pavement is populate.
There is a lot of data, and the people who measure this (or at least some of them) are aware of the issues and so correct for them. However you cannot just blindly apply the central limit theorem.
Really? That's pretty horrible understanding of stats you have there. By your logic, it makes no sense to say that the fertility rate is 1.81 and has changed by 0.8 to now be 1.73 because a woman can either give birth to 1 or 2 kids.
We do measure Earth's average temperature for what it's worth and while different metrics might give different results, the absolute value is not really useful. What is useful is the change in that metric. And if our global temperatures change by 0.1C by any one metric, it is a very significant change given that the metric is well designed. And yes, it is possible to design a good metric.
Economic class is highly correlated with social, religious, ethnic, tribal class. If there are more social, religious, ethnic, tribal classes in a single country (i.e. the country is diverse) then in another, then you do need to sample more of the groups to get sample means free from systematic bias.
Simple example: image you are asked to compute the mean diameter of all balls in each of two bags. You open the first bag, and it is all blue balls, and they all look very close in radius. So you measure a few and call it a day. You open the second bag, and there are balls of about 50 different colors, and it seems like all the colors have different radius. So, then to get a good result, you need to measure almost the diameter of most of the colors.
Most of aid sent to India, is mostly sent to undermine the country.
Most of british aid sent to India, is sent to convert people to Christianity via missionaries.
American aid to its NGOs are sent to bring about regime changes and influence elections via USAID.
etc, etc.
Not to mention India itself disburses aid money to countries across the world.
Now that USAID has been thrown under the bus, it’s actually a golden opportunity for Europe to both rethink and boost aid programs.
India is a crucial counterbalance to China. Now that the USA is retreating into internal bickering and giving up its global leadership, Europe should continue building ties with India and helping them lift people out of poverty.
It’s not Indian newspaper, its british newspaper.
They’ve been asking UK to stop the aid since 2008,
It’s being sent out of corruption deals between UK politicians and local special interest groups who are friends with those politicians.
India never asked for any of these aids.
The total aid India receives is smaller than the bloody fertiliser SUBSIDY budget of the country.
It’s literally trinkets and they actively do not want it.
India also banned foreign contributions and aid money being sent to its local NGOs without central government permission, just to put a stop to this.
India's government doesn't accept aid, so whatever "aid" is being sent is to shady institutions anyway. Stopping this "aid" will only net the country a positive impact.
That's a strange claim. A quick Google will provide all kinds of data on the aid being sent to India from multiple countries. The recent "USAID kerfuffle" also surfaced all the instances of the current government accepting USAID funding, e.g. https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/22/before-bjps-usaid-out...
Something not talked about much in the press is how much FCRA has hurt NGOs and non-profits operating in India. From personal experience: I tried to get my US-based employer to match my donation to a local non-profit in India, which didn't work out because FCRA regulations basically made it a non-starter.
Aechive copy: https://archive.is/7O00b
I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
You can check out a range of important development statistics on India here: https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Some of these graphs are highly inaccurate due to how the government skews employment data. For example, the government counts jobless people as "employed" if they return to their villages from cities due to lack of employment and occasionally help on family farms.
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
https://dge.gov.in/dge/sites/default/files/2024-02/Employmen...
https://thewire.in/economy/share-of-agriculture-in-employmen...
As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.
>moralizing over diet
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »).
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Eggs are an outstanding source of protein, culturally well-known, easy to transport, cook, etc.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
> INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
These metrics are there to measure progress, and the progress is real and happening. My dad was born in 1951 in a village in neighboring Bangladesh. When he was a kid, over 30% of kids died before age 5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072376/child-mortality-.... This was an improvement compared to 50 years before that, when the under-5 mortality rate was about half (which was about the same as in pre-industrial Europe). Today, the under 5 mortality rate is only 3%. Still higher than the sub-1% of the U.S., but similar to what it was in the U.S. in 1951 at the same time my dad was born.
This sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric.
On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
I always had to think of my grandparents when discussing GDP. Aside from being very much part of the regular economy, they were also quite self sufficient. When my grandmother died, we found rows and rows of bottled jam. Some decades old according to the labels. My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. To the GDP that whole side of life is invisible. But it makes a big different in terms of resiliency when disaster hits. I'm assuming it was a reaction to WW2 or maybe it just is what people always did. I'm guessing that a lot of people in India are quite self sufficient (although I wouldn't know) so the financialization of every day life and resulting gdp growth is indeed a flawed indicator.
Nah it's not a WW2 thing. Not sure about Western Europe but in Central/Eastern Europe, especially in rural areas, people still have chambers and basements full of jam, compote and basically anything else which can be preserved. Not one or two jars but enough to last several years, that kind of stuff.
Valuing self-sufficiency over dollar efficiency or even time efficiency is not dead.
I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.
> My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually.
Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest.
Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
Also: anything relating to home cooking, exercise, self-care, relationships and caring for children and other relatives. Only "paid professional" services are counted which are often much worse quality than the organic untaxed real thing.
It depends on estimates. I have seen estimates which included all that and also things like illegal prostitution in services category.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/30/nicholaswatt.m...
> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.
(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
That's still 'trade' though. As in, money changing hands.
ok but "untaxed non-monetary things part of a wholesome life" and "black market money exchange" are very different topics
It's funny, because not only would I value her jam, I would also value it much higher than anything I could get from the store.
Interesting. So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional, paid by people who enjoy the food, you would be at least sceptical, when it comes to quality?
I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)
If that person makes a home-cooked meal for their family, no doubt adding value to the world, the value added is not counted towards GDP. Only the "money (or something else taxable) changing hands" transactions are counted.
Most people who make homecooked meals will buy food from a store so it will show up, just indirectly.
Only the inputs, not the value add.
"So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional," - do you typically know all that about the people who staff the restaurants you visit? And do you think it is the case?
I can say that I would rather visit my friends and have a homecooked meal over a restaurant visit any day of the week. There is an intangible value to the combination of food and personal relationships.
For babysitting it's obviously better for the children to be with their family instead of "cared for" by the first stranger that accepts the lowest wage.
>This sounds like bit of column one and column two. On one hand, poverty by income in USD must assume that the world's economy had globalized enough, such that, there can be no such locations on Earth as where $0.01 pays Michelin star lunch for dozen healthy adults. That's going to completely break premises of this metric.
Poverty levels are measured with PPP dollars, so that's already factored in.
Somewhat, nationwide PPP dollars suggest incomes in San Francisco and Boise Idaho are equivalent.
India and China have similar regional differences.
That's only an issue if you use nationwide metrics to make local comparisons (eg. are new yorkers richer than people in Kolkata?), but if you're comparing the entire country it's fine.
If the goal is to measure things operating at the individual level like poverty then internal differences matter even when comparing countries.
People living in Alaska are a lot poorer than their income suggests because of shipping and heating costs.
It is measured and there are targets - https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/
That's correct but my point is what kind of poverty is the poverty line measuring if it does not take into account how much people are getting to eat. This access to PPP adjusted dollar amount is clearly not a good heuristic for it because somehow extreme poverty has been alleviated while having a hunger index worse than North Korea.
https://www.unicef.org/india/reports/indias-progress-malnutr...
Malnourishment is also steadily diminishing. Effectively because food affordability improves as poverty diminishes. It's a good proxy.
>while having a hunger index worse than North Korea.
Relying on North Korean statistics to make your point is... questionable
If you want to reduce poverty it's handy to have some metrics. Obviously it's a simplification of reality but you can't really track all 8bn people individually to see how they are doing.
Sure you can. But it costs more.
Try to live below that poverty line for a few months, and I'm pretty sure you will understand it.
I agree.
By many reports, half of Indian homes do not have toilets.
Even if earning above some arbitrary dollar threshold, they sound uncomfortably "poor" to me.
> Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.
We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
The Lancet suggests that the difference between very poor nutrition and great nutrition adds up to roughly 8 inches (20cm) of adult height. Height remains very genetically heritable, aside from that.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/children-height-gap-...
You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
My parents were both upper class in Bangladesh (so a rich diet in fish, meat, etc.) and I'm 3" taller than my dad (moved to US at 5) and my brother is 5" taller (born in US).
Is air quality a problem in the city where you grew up?
No. Not at all.
>>We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry.
Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal).
Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai).
Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
They probably eat a lot more protein than their parents.
There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010).
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-...
Your first link says that it measures calories available and not calories consumed. It links to an undernourishment metric instead the world average for it has remained about the same for about a decade. I am not expert and I am probably cherry picking the page that matches my bias but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
It is used to justify and excuse WEF-imposed restructuring which in reality comes at tremendous human cost.
>WEF-imposed restructuring
The WEF is a talk shop that has no power to impose any sort of restructuring. Are you talking about the IMF?
The usual claim is that the people who are involved do have power to effect policies (mostly by deciding what to throw money at I think), and that that's where they meet to bounce ideas off eachother and generally get all on the same page.
It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
The point is to get a sense of progress or not. It only creates a sense of progress if there actually is some.
The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rk5d7ekjmo
I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear. What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
> The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachievable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critiqu...
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-gr...
This shows you don’t know what extreme poverty is and how horrible it is.
What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing.
Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
The criticisms against charity and progress seem to be politically motivated. Human suffering can be used as a commodity to influence elections or promote specific ideologies. If you start measuring the suffering and show progress, you take away their commodity and thus become a threat. I.e. "how dare you say you're improving? There's still plenty of suffering going on". This position is a shift from continuous scale to simple binary thinking. At which point, anyone without new clothes and an air conditioned SUV is "poor".
India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness.
Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.
I wouldn't say the momentum has stopped.
Anecdote alert: I travel to India at least once in a year and I have to take the train each time (sleeper class) and I can definitely attest that things have significantly improved since I was a kid. I have been taking these same trains for over 25 years now. For starters the toilets actually don't dump directly between the tracks. The railway employees seem to be quite happy and take pride in their job (they used to always have depressing faces when I was growing up).
Another anecdote : If 20 years ago you took a flight that goes to India, you would be frustrated with the condition of the toilets. It was so bad I used to avoid Indian carriers just because of that and intentionally take a layover in Europe so at least part of the flying experience would be cleaner. These days I don't feel that way, I find flights to India pretty much the same as any other flights.
That said, there is still a LOT to be done, but I think overall people do seem to care about hygiene more than they used to years ago. Also, assuming there is always a certain percentage of population that will never care about this (in any country) it is bound to look a bit worse in India due to the higher population density.
>>For starters the toilets actually don't dump directly between the tracks.
That's still there :)
You don't cross(on a two wheeler) below a bridge on which a train is passing for the obvious reasons(Golden shower).
Do they still spray down the aircraft cabin and passengers with insecticide?
India is on a steady path of improvement and has awareness campaigns running that adress these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
https://innovateindia.mygov.in/toilet-campaign/
https://siwi.org/latest/the-clean-india-mission-worlds-large...
The recent Delhi election,
I was watching videos of some of the slums.
There were literal hills of rotting organic garbage inside the slums. With children living next to them.
I had visions of Paul Ehrlich freaking out at the sight of people defecating and bathing on the roadside in Delhi.
I saw photos of some of the "mohalla clinics" (free basic healthcare clinics) that the previous Delhi government had (admittedly admirably) set up. Some of them looked so dirty and structurally unsound that they wouldn't be allowed to function as holding pens for farm animals in the US.
In the US, we have companies like Waste Management handle our waste. Surprises me that India doesn't have a dozen Waste Managements by now. Billion dollar unicorns/startups/whatever, innovating in turning "waste to wealth" (as Nitin Gadkari calls it). Put capitalism to use where there's a failure of non-capitalism to solve the problem. But there might be deep cultural issues. I suspect the caste system plays a part. The forward castes believe that trash management is beneath them.
One issue is the unfortunate deep level of corruption in Indian society.
If people create many waste management companies and people tried to invest in them then some people would just create fake companies and simply steal the money. There’s no trust.
Or at least that’s the way it used to be decades prior. Your suggestion nowadays might actually work because the Indian government has now identification measures for every Indian citizen. And other new technologies and enforcement which make this type of corruption more easier to eliminate.
But the deep seated cultural perceptions of dishonesty and endemic corruption from the past will continue for many years unfortunately.
Hopefully one day India can become the kind of place you are suggesting.
>>One issue is the unfortunate deep level of corruption in Indian society.
Blame every thing on "Corruption". This is such cope.
All you have to do is ensure you do your part in keeping things around you clean. You can ghost walk streets in the poorest places in Mexico and they look affluent compared to even posh neighbourhoods in India.
Lets call it as it is, We Indians need to seriously address our cultural tendencies. Im not just talking about some immediate sense of urgency. But how we go about living our every day life. Unless you address this at a core level, and create a proactive sense of awareness about hygiene in people this isn't going to change.
It sounds like you are trying to argue with what I said.
But…I think what you said doesn’t really contradict what I said. I actually agree with what you are saying about cultural tendencies.
You can't just personal responsibility your way out of deeply-ingrained societal issues.
I think with a big enough governmental and cultural push, you could. Something like the white feather campaign, or the various “help the war by doing x” things that happened in WW2.
Honestly, they should really make it a priority. The awareness of what India is like has severely hurt their international reputation.
I believe that's ingrained in the culture to live besides the filth and romanticize poverty.
There was a recent scandal involving someone spitting paan/chewing tobacco on the floor inside one of the state assemblies.
A video I watched of a brand spanking new metro station in Mumbai. Marble floors and all. And a commenter pointed out a timestamp where you can see paan/chewing tobacco spit in a corner of the floor.
Here's what baffles me. It is well established that Indians chew paan/chewing tobacco. It is well established that they then spit these out. Why don't they have spitoons installed inside the state assembly or metro stations? Treat it as a cultural opportunity: create beautiful spitoons with culturally relevant designs on them. The type kings used to have in their courts. And have them sponsored by businesses (i.e. let them post digital banner ads on them). Enlightened capitalism!
Better yet would be to ban the practice entirely; spittoons in the US (think generic wild west saloons) were a major source of spreading diseases like tuberculosis. They (and chewing tobacco) went out of fashion in the '30's due to shifting perceptions of hygiene, and both chewing gum and cigarettes becoming the more favorable options. I'm not sure how much campaigning was done to achieve that though.
"The Ugly Indian" [1] (a ragtag group of anonymous citizens) usually does that in India. In reality, though, these kinds of issues are only really seen as a minor inconvenience at most. Anecdotally, most middle-class people in here frown upon chewing tobacco, so I assume the government thinks that as long as they keep it relatively clean, nobody would think of dirtying it with their paan stains.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1VA5jqmRo
Someone willing to spit their filthy tobacco saliva everywhere and anywhere is not going to go out of their way to use a spitoon.
Then someone has to empty the spittoons, people will use them as urinals and garbage cans, etc.
That's because no politician wants to be the one "promoting tobacco products" with such an initiative.
Disgustingly racist comment.
It's specifically a problem of culture, not race. Human "races" are equal, cultures are not.
The term "racist" lost its pedantic meaning long ago. From the current Oxford Dictionary of English:
How do you explain the differences across South Asia by anything else than cultural attitudes towards cleanliness and dirt?
Singapore is very clean. Malaysia is fairly clean. Cambodia sort of. India and Philippines very much not.
And Zoroastrians are absolutely meticulous about cleanliness, be they poor or rich.
All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.
India is extremely poor per-capita.
Nearly all of India is poor. If you step out of major metros, that is as little as 30 - 40 kms from major metros you will see never ending poverty.
Job options are non existent. Farming and some local trade is all you have. There is also total absence of health care infrastructure. Most people have to travel to metros for healthcare. Last time I visited a small town in my weekend motorcycle rides to see my former manager, the biggest political issue in the town was wanting a kidney speciality hospital built. It turns out taking a day off(loss of earnings), traveling to Bangalore, spending money and time for dialysis was bankrupting entire family trees. Similar situations exist for bypass surgeries, and getting stent installed in heart. You will hear these stories for all kinds of major ailments.
Options for schooling and cram schools are absent. Your kids don't get a competitive peer group, or decent enough tuition/coaching to compete with students from metros, and once you lose your chance to study engineering/medicine its just one more generation of poverty your bloodline has to endure.
In the metros, if you have the money you get good hospital and schools. But owning a home is nearly impossible these days. By and large if you don't make it to FAANG in a few years, you just leave and move abroad.
Nearly every young person I know doesn't even try and default goal is either Gulf or Jobs in western countries.
In short, its a brutal Zero sum game, everybody grabs whatever they can, by any means they can, even if they have to burn down the whole thing in the process.
Watched videos, seeing photos... you should travel a bit more IMHO. Not everything is quickly solvable by 'billion dollar startup' mentality. Understand their culture and history a bit, where they are coming from and where they as society go, realistic limits and so on.
Culture can be changed. That's the power of Western countries- constant change. Nothing is ever set in stone.
If you think western countries are in a state of constant change just wait until you visit india a few times.
[dead]
Are you sure? Having lived all across the country (and currently in Mumbai), I haven't seen any progress on that part since at least the last half decade.
The "Swacch Bharat" campaign that was launched more than a decade ago only gave some short-lived upgrades to public places.
> the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train
The video in question seems to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci-QQaP2fSM
It is pretty shocking, but at least not as shocking as garbage trucks dumping trash into the river (of which there are many online)
>>I don't know why the momentum stopped.
There was no momentum. People never started, it was more of a marketing campaign.
Almost everyday I see people throw garbage around street corners, if you ask them not to, they gang up and go after you like its their birth right to be dirty and you are being evil by keeping clean.
You need to tear down the whole shebang and rebuild it from scratch, much of this also about income levels of the ordinary Indian, and being so poor, keeping clean isn't any where in the list of priorities.
I'm someone who tends to keep to themselves but even I notice it when there are trash bags left behind by some asshole.
Considering the lower wages it shouldn't be that expensive for an Indian city to hire some garbage collectors?
> India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness.
And women harassment. Maybe that should be the top1 priority.
And that too. Bollywood movies are said to include r*pe scenes to increase sales. It's really sad.
Minor nitpick, there’s no such thing as disposable plastic.
China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago.
How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically.
I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference.
But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Theory (I live half a world away though): totalitarianism. China has a very strong and top-down government, where if the leadership decides for example that streets should be clean, millions of government officials make it happen. I don't know if that is just good organization or if it's backed by e.g. legal repercussions if it's not done right though.
But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.
But that doesn’t explain Taiwan. Even Vietnam is nicer than India.
population size? imo it makes huge difference in how effective you can govern.
>TW/SKR/JP
Was authoritarianism
>VNM/PRC/SIN
Is authoritarian
The TLDR is competent dictatorship and normalization (really cooperation) with hegemon (US) made rapid export led growth work. The dictator sets up the industries, the hegemon consumes the outputs. Need both, transition away from authoritarian is optional though (especially resource exporters that hegemon needs).
Democracies to my knowledge has been incapable of bootstrapping the 0-1 agrarian -> industrial development fast. I can't really think of one that didn't industrialize from exploitation/colonial phase prior to democratizing.
India hindered by being "real" democracy with universal sufferage at the outset while being very multicultural. It's... very helpful for development to culturally genocide society into relative monoculture. You want that migrant country girl from Z village to be fungible cog in factory Y, and you start that by making sure everyone can interact with language Z.
Taiwan isn’t China.
Taiwan was authoritarian until the 1990s-2000s.
And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family).
If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India.
And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities.
My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer.
A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
I wonder how much meals can culture provide
It is much harder to report on problems in China than in India for one.
There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppressing videos that show litter on the streets than a video of a woman slowly running over a child, putting her car in reverse and running over them again, all while people walk by and pretend they don't see it happen?
Is it that hard to find? This[1] took me one search on YouTube. I agree that India is filthy, but it's not hard to find such videos for China either.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14
Do these look the same level of filthy to you? This is the capital city New Delhi (Yamuna River, which is worshipped):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83t0hdJG8AI
The lack of help from bystanders is/was due to some strange liability doctrine that assisting can/could make you liable for damages. This is fairly old information though so hopefully it has changed.
Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
> China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad
they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally
they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/cross...
With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they
Despite the pragmatism in economics and trade, China is firmly authoritarian and under the control of the CCCP.You can read professor Vivek Chibbers book "locked in place". I highly recommend it (any book of his actually). It's an account of why India's economy was and still is an utter failure.
China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?
It was liberalization in addition to strong and relatively benevolent enforcement of the market.
Just allowing the existence of private enterprise doesn't mean much when institutions are weak or corrupt. If you know everyone isn't playing by the rules, the most you can accomplish is rent-seeking while everyone tries to make each other suckers.
If all you have is a strong ML-style government and no liberalization, however, then there's not much of a point in finding opportunities to invest because everything you have is at the mercy of the Party.
China succeeded because investors gambled correctly that liberalization would be accompanied by credible governance, and it can all go away if and when the credibility for investors and entrepreneurs is replaced by Xi's neo-Maoism.
> can all go away if and when the credibility for investors and entrepreneurs is replaced by Xi's neo-Maoism.
You mean US' various anti China sanctions and trade restrictions
It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. Far poorer than even China.
In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war.
All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today.
Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say.
Also thank you for the book recommendation.
You'll love the book then. Chibber compares India's path to South Korea and Taiwan, and why liberalization wasn't "the" key ingredient, but certainly one of the important ones
>>It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth.
In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education.
To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen.
The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate?
You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.
This is a very sweeping generalization.
The party that got voted out was mired in corruption scams and their premise to power was fighting against corruption.
Politics in India can be a lot more nuanced than you claim it to be. What you are saying is one part of the equation.
> India's economy was and still is an utter failure.
It's currently an "utter failure"? I only know how to read Wikipedia, and that tells me it's the 5th largest economy in the world and currently growing faster than China. Of course it's still very poor per-capita but "utter failure" paints a very different picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Data
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> China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness
Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different.
In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government.
In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization.
That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics).
Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
>>urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
That is because citizens themselves don't care.
Single biggest motivation of the Indian voter base is using the process of elections and then elected politician like attack dogs to hurt the people they hate(Often minorities). This is through and through. This manifests along the lines of religion and caste, mostly. But regionalism and language politics has played its part in the past. But in the past few decades its mostly religion.
Every time a political party does something good, anything good. Especially uniformly for the masses, they are voted out. This is because in a country like India, people don't want things to uniformly improve for everyone. The goal is always for your(community) to have an edge, while everybody else must be made to suffer. Any other arrangement and the masses feel their favorite politicians didn't hurt the people they hate enough.
>>That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years.
Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka, has gotten significantly dirtier, garbage littered and both dusty and polluted in the past decades.
>>Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore
Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
> That is because citizens themselves don't care.
This isn't about citizens. Fundamentally, residents in a mega-city like Bangalore simply do not matter in a parliamentary democracy like Karnataka. Bangalore doesn't make you CM, so there's no incentive for Karnataka's politicians to invest in it.
> Every time a political party
Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy. INC, BJP, JDS, etc can win elections, but local government such as public works are apolitical. The issue is states in India do NOT devolve planning commissions to local government - just about every function that a city would have (Zoning, Permitting, Land Acquisition) are managed by state level planning commissions. India is unique in the level of centralization that state level governments have.
> Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka
Karnataka is not the rest of India. Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management. The fact that much poorer Indore can outcompete Bangalore in cleanliness and urban management is a testament to the fact that it's about local government.
Also, ime, Delhi NCR (not just Delhi and Noida but also ancillary towns like Kurkushetra and Karnal), Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Coimbatore have all steadily gotten much better over the past 10 years. Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
> Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
These are multi-million person cities with populations similar to Bangalore barely 10-15 years ago, yet they are still cleaner and better managed than Bangalore circa 2010.
While population does play a role, Karnataka is unique in that the JDS admin in the 1990s removed almost all urban governance responsibilities from Bangalore and moved it to either the State Commission (eg. zoning) or privatized (eg. garbage collection - but this was because of the World Bank).
Industrialization, obviously. China made more money, and faster.
All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.
Why didn't India industrialize like China did?
China has central planning.
But I thought central planning was bad for economic development. Or was that authoritarianism?
Central planning and authoritarianism can be very effective at changing the course of an organization, government, or country; once the choice is made.
What they don't always do well is make the choice to change when conditions change. There's also usually a limited bandwidth for deciding and forcing change, so you tend to end up without economic diversity and without great results in areas outside of policy.
A democratic/distributed decision making process tends towards slower changes and less alignment, but more diversity.
If you decide to be the world's production line, economic diversity may be less important. But having diversity is usually a good thing when economic tides change.
Central planning is very good for pulling a country out of an a poorly developed state into a highly developed state. The USSR experience this under Stalin (setting aside that he was a mass murderer) which created an industrial power. Even in the US, during WW2 the industry was centrally planned and that pulled the US out of the Great Depression.
However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.
But it only got richer as it liberalized?
Reality is often complicated and ideology fails to fit everything in a neat little box.
So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies.
There may even be some overlap between the two.
>>I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference.
India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry.
You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.
China has more and better human capital than India.
Check this out: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.
India has similar barriers for foreign manufacturing businesses to enter as those that China has.
And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end.
The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
I think the caste aspect makes sense in terms of who a politician feels responsible for when they are in power. For example, typical upper caste politician might feel that they only need to improve the conditions of upper caste people while not feeling responsible for people in lower castes, or just people who are poor in general. I think sentiments like that is prevalent across politics in India, though I agree about there being no solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities.
A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0].
And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1]
> state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality
These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly).
It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2]
[0] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-p...
[1] - https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/
[2] - https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understandi...
> Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0].
Now, but the argument concerns development over the 20th century, not the current makeup.
The OBC/SC/ST plurality has been the norm in Indian politics since the 1980s.
China and India only began to diverge in the late 2000s to early 2010s, and much of that is due to China's investment in urban construction and real estate, while India's economy entered a lost decade due to a loan origination crisis.
India did a fork in its flavor of politics in the 1980s. The goals went from making a industrial state, with a big middle class, with health care, housing, decent working hours and retirement -to- making politics whose goals were restoring cultural-religious pride and history revisionism.
There was total chaos through 1980s and 1990s, governments would come and go without outright majority without much progress on the economic front. Only exception was being at the right time and place for the outsourcing boom. But its effects were limited to a few cities and groups of people.
There was some correction in 2000s, but it does look like making a affluent industrial economy is neither the goal of the political class or the electoral section.
> And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities.
Hyperlocal corruption/nobility is the worst kind of corruption/nobility.
Non-local ones will at least create systems that work, supporting infrastructure, and will try to maintain some amount of material wealth that they can prey upon.
> The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
I don't see the significance of this.
Civic pride? It seems to me that Chinese really are motivated to see their country do better.
China very specifically and deliberately set out to build up its export capability in a way that was highly centralized and consolidated (specifically around the Yangtze Delta), whereby entire supply chains were located next to each, lowering the cost of production and making it difficult for other countries to compete even if they had lower wages. This was not by accident.
The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root.
Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).
The article is interesting, the headline is baffling. It seems to be claiming that it is possible to pay Indians a medium-single-figure daily wage (ie, $1,000/year) despite having 40% of the country working in the agricultural industry.
Great but that myth is and was of no real interest to anyone and isn't a very useful frame for the article. India still needs to move most of the population on to doing something more productive than inefficiently looking after plants. The goal is not 1 billion people living off slightly more than $1,000/year. The goal is living standards at least an order of magnitude higher if not several orders. That requires capital, not subsistence+ farming. Which, to their credit, is what the Indians seem to be focusing on.
> inefficiently looking after plants
Might be a better life than smelling exhaust gas and looking at screens for 3/4 of our existence. Then wake up and worry about AI eventually eating our jobs.
I take looking at screens in an office over breathing exhaust gases and pesticides any day. Working on a farm is hard work even in developed countries.
By the time most of India is at the level of development that their problem is looking at screens, the cars will be battery-electric.
AI has as much chance of taking your job as combine harvesters have of taking everyone's job that currently has one in India working on farms: 99%, maybe, but also 0%.
From my perspective (ultimately), it's about building infrastructure, education, and industries that sustainably improve quality of life
> India still needs to move most of the population on to doing something more productive than inefficiently looking after plants.
Not sure that this should be the goal.
This is wonderful news and a framework for other countries to accomplish the same. I sensed the US’ “peacekeeping” role (I know, I know) and foreign aid spending has helped much of the global south reduce extreme poverty since the 80s. That doesn’t mean people’s lives are especially comfortable but it’s an upgrade. I think historically that will be US’ largest impact, and we are unlikely to accomplish anything as significant again. I don’t mean to imply US always did a respectable or honorable job in this role (I didn’t forget what the ford and Rockefeller foundations did)
Now that the US seems intent on burning every international aid project we have, I hope other countries can help fill the gap and help lift other poor countries a little higher. It seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Even if it is neglible, it is still millions of people. Plus if industrial miracle, so to say, had been allowed to happen, this might have happened much sooner. And this country is yet to deal with the massive impact that potential impacts that AI could have on it econcomy.
I do think labor in India will be cheaper than using any AI for quite some time longer than in the West.
I also worry that the major negative effects of AI in India will not be economic but will be social as the society is extremely low trust at the moment due to widespread corruption, criminals being lauded by the government, killings of journalists, communal tensions, huge pollution, and tons of other problems.
But the real question is: what comes next? Just clearing the $2.15 threshold isn't enough—there's still a long road to real economic security
Exactly what I was thinking. With population not slowing down anytime soon, what are the next steps?
> what are the next steps?
I'd say huge investments in improving things like infrastructure (roads, water, sewage, electricity), quality of housing, etc. China has a lot of experience in this regard with huge, admittedly failed projects of building entire cities from scratch (failed because nobody actually lives there).
>China has a lot of experience in this regard with huge, admittedly failed projects of building entire cities from scratch (failed because nobody actually lives there).
Build it and they will come.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_i...
>Although a feature of discourse on the Chinese economy and urbanization in China in the 2010s, many developments that were initially criticized as "ghost cities" in China have since become occupied and are now functioning cities.[5][6][7][8]
What? India has a TFR of 2.01. Population growth is over.
Population growth isn't quite over because people also live longer than before. But yeah the days of rapid growth are quite gone.
“One’s desires are endless, however much one gets.”
Truth.
Not my experience at all. Saturation is a real phenomenon.
While I admit to not having been able to read the article, this is very true. In my country, everyone has access to free healthcare, housing, food, and even tertiary education for most people, especially the poorest. But there are still endless complaints about poverty. Sometimes a person will have to live in a (free) hotel because all the immediately available free housing is in another city where they don't want to live despite being still perfectly well developed and comfortable.
We'll never get rid of poverty because people keep raising the bar no matter how wealthy they get.
Poverty perception is relative. Most people judge their position on the poor/rich scale based on their sorroundings, rather than in absolute value.
Also to the point on raising the bar. I think that is not a bad thing.
Raising the bar is good but there are people who will exploit the feelings of people who perceive to be disenfranchised (and will cherry-pick some aspects where they are really worse off now compared to the past) and they will inflate their anger and may lead to destroying the actual progress that has been made.
This can happen with the best of intentions too.
This is the key point.
We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life. No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
Being a rich person in the renaissance period seems like it'd be nice if you only look at paintings glorifying the lifestyle. But when you sit down and think about the nitty gritty daily life, it would suck compared to an average modern lifestyle. Yet the rich back then were surely quite comfortable, just like the rich today are. And the rich centuries from now will look at the mega rich today and be amazed that they lived such quaint lives without food teleporters and instant cancer zappers and weekend trips to the balmy shores of Ganymede.
Saying the poor can't be dissatisfied with the inequality in society today because "things were worse in the past for the poor" can really be extended to anyone and anything. There's always something in the past that was worse than a typical bad experience today. But the past is full of horrors that we should learn from and not repeat.
"No AC in the summer"
Have you ever been in a castle? Thermal mass is highly underestimated from my experience. I suggest the likes of Foix in warm southern france in the peak of summer. Walking into one of the lower rooms where the doors are wide open and such is like walking into a fridge.
> No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
I think this is greatly exaggerated. Actual royalty had access to vast amounts of physical and mental labor that only the billionaires of modern society could rival.
No A/C? You can pay people to bring ice into your house and cool you. No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that. Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
Modern world has conveniences, but so many people cannot afford any labor at all. Royalty had leisure time that most modern people can barely afford.
Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You're possibly dead from malaria, and no doctor can treat you. (People still die today, but you're much, much more likely to survive) Get syphilis? Your body is going to slowly rot away. Having a kid? Better have a few backups, because even the children of the rich dropped like flies.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.
> Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy?
The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.
> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?
An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.
> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.
Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.
> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.
It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.
What other mode of transport did you have? ships was all. even if you used an oxcart (not a horse - they eat too much for this work) it was slow.
okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.
>No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that.
...and die 2 weeks later from an infection because antibiotics haven't been discovered yet
>Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
The lack of air freight means even if you can send some guy to get it, by the time it arrives it'll be rotten.
Free housing & food? Which country is that?
The UK is infamous for housing illegal immigrants in hotels, and they don't just get free food but free money, too. Oh, and free healthcare.
Free money, housing, and healthcare for everyone is also the law here in Germany, which is why we get flooded by illegal immigrants too..
..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing. You can only afford something like this if your population overwhelmingly consists of educated, skilled people with a strong work ethic who would never voluntarily sign up for welfare. Once you allow millions of foreigners into the country who are neither educated nor skilled nor have a work ethic such systems start to collapse.
> ..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing.
No, it's not. The weight of illegals on the welfare system is a rounding error compared to the effects of an aging population. And if you were familiar with people in this situation rather than spitting out far-right talking points you'd know that's it's not an enviable situation and not one they yearn to stay in.
So then why do millions come to the US to work backbreaking jobs in the agriculture or construction sector risking deportation and receiving no such benefits? It turns out the greatest economic impetus for migration is not available social services but available work of better pay. Same reasons why software engineers flock to the coasts. You see migration into Germany because literally all of south and eastern and the poorer parts of western europe are clamoring for finding work in Germany. And of course also middle easterners and africans, which the right wing media seems to fixate almost exclusively and not the constant flow of slavic people doing the same for the same reasons, probably owing to skin color and religion and the ease of slanting rhetoric along those lines for propaganda purposes for the bigots of the right wing base.
Maybe read and spread less Russian propaganda. Illegal immigrants never get anything in EU, other than Schengen entry bans.
Please read this article in German: https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/so-viel-gibt-muenchen...
They get not only free housing, but also free food and even a janitor! That’s better than significant part of the population does. Do you think, that delivery driver or a nurse can afford more?
Illegal migrants that claim asylum in Germany and Sweden have never got any public services, housing or other support?
Really, that is your position?!
I don't think asylum seekers are typically considered illegal immigrants. I think that's more individuals who either don't seek legal status, or have tried to get a legal status but failed and stayed in the country anyway.
And I don't think Sweden and Germany are giving free housing to individuals that overstayed their visas.
I'm in France, healthcare is also for the illegals in the form of AME (Aide Médical de l'État).
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3079
All the free claims of facilities here ONLY exists to support corruption. These free things are not materially helping poor people hence everyone seems to be unhappy. For example, in India it takes almost $700k per km of road construct while in the US, it takes only $120k per km to construct the road.
And when it comes to other attributes like quality of the road, speed of the construction or durability of the road.... It's far worst than the USA.
All the Indian govt programs only exists to support their corrupt contractors and not for helping people genuinely.
There seems to be some discussion about how this can be squared with the actual reality of poverty in India as perceived by people who live or visit there. One thing to consider is that the work (or similar recent work) by Bhalla and Bhassin that underlies this claim has been strongly criticized for using unrealistic poverty benchmarks:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...
So maybe the myth has not been undermined.
I'm no expert, but I have a feeling that the poverty line is not correct.
I know this is anecdotal, but I visited nine cities in India last year (including New Delhi), and the sidewalks were full of homeless people. At night, it was literally hard to walk through some areas because people were sleeping everywhere in the streets.
I've never seen anything like that in the US or Europe.
I might have a huge blindspot.
Before British rule India had one of the highest GDPs in the world, it became impoverished after the loot and famines of British rule. Then it had 60+ years of corrupt and stagnant rule, in the last decade or so the people have had enough and are now voting in people only who believe in development. This is what you are seeing in this data.
> so the people have had enough and are now voting in people only who believe in development. This is what you are seeing in this data.
It is a strong reason why people praise the current Indian ruling government ive noticed both among poor masses, middle class and elite, so you’re correct.
But they and the opposition all win elections there primarily on freebies, whichever party promises freebies wins in most parts of India.
It’s just that people are more confident on freebies coming to them, if they vote the party in their province/state if the party is also ruling at the central level, since taxes are passed from centre to state, especially in the last 10 years with introduction of GST, etc.
So yea, it is much more mixed, that just that reason, not to mention, first past the post, and uneven population sizes across different states, also change matters a lot.
By western (de-facto) standards the vast majority of Indians will still be considered under poverty.
What does neglible mean when talking about extreme poverty
Rs. 2700 per month ($32) is the poverty threshold for Urban dwellers? That does not sound right, seems like manipulation.
Where did you get that number? 2.15 USD = 187 INR/day = 5610 INR/month.
Shamika Ravi, author of the study revealed the figures on her Twitter.
i dont understand how the minimum non taxable income is 12 lakhs per annum (~10000 GBP) when a generous daily wage is like 1000 rupees (~10 GBP) a day.
India’s economy is based on Domestic consumption instead of exports. If you tax its middle class (which is people above that income). Then consumption tanks entirely, They used to tax from a much lower rate at 7lakhs per annum and it was actively crushing their domestic consumption markets.
They’ve been trying to revive and boost their declining consumption economy. India’s 10% population drives >50% of entire consumption, >80% of entire retail goods consumption outside of base essential commodities.
Trust is low corruption high and a lot of people just don't pay taxes -- historically https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37530290
Counter balance:
“According to the 2023 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 111th out of 125 countries, with a score of 28.7, indicating a “serious” level of hunger. Although this is a slight improvement from its 2015 score of 29.2, the progress has been slow compared to countries with similar economic growth rates. India also has the highest child wasting rate in the world at 18.7%. And 35.5% of children under five are medically listed as having their growth stunted, a condition that leads to long-term developmental complications.”
— https://outreach-international.org/blog/malnutrition-in-indi...
I would urge you to watch a statistical debunking of these so-called "global goodness" metrics. Sanjeev Sanyal does a good job of it [1],[2],[3] Multiple organization(s) that manage such indices are, turns out, funded by the same cabal who want to concoct a narrative. They are not unbiased.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lgf2WHstBY
[2] [PDF] https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Reversing-Ga...
[3] https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/sanjeev-sanyal-blas...
You quote a ruling party cheerleader to claim that anyone showing the real truth about India is just part of Soros gang :)
Three significant figures for a somewhat rough measurement of poverty over a sample of a population as diverse as India should have one's BS alarms blaring.
Actually both 28,7 and 29,2 = 30.
Social workers playing at science.
I fail to see how diversity in the country would change those metrics.
It makes it harder (impossible even) to take precise measurements deep into the decimal places if you have massive contours in the very thing (wealth) you are trying to measure with just one scalar number.
Diversity is not meant in the modern political interpretation.
As an less triggering exercise: try record in a single number the temperature - and change - of a large geographically diverse place like Australia - which has deserts and forests and is also subject to large periodic fluctuations like el Niño/la Niña.
I submit that you would be embarrassed to say it went from 28,7°C to 29,2°C and think it meant anything.
The misuse (and misunderstanding) of significant figures (let alone averages) is rampant in the social sciences. To the disadvantage of the folk we are all trying to help.
If the mean rolling average of all tempreture readings across Australia moved by 0.5 across a twelve month period that would indeed be a significant change that would certainly mean something.
Indeed, but not if your thermometer could only measure in 2°C increments.
You don't gain accuracy by averaging a bunch of rough measurements, especially if the micro-climate has a lot of diversity.
Statistics is tough.
Luckily the Australian BOM Weather Station specifications require that air and soil temp sensors have a -60° C to +60° C range with a 0.1° C resolution and a ±0.1° C accuracy.
The specs are in attachment 2 of the BoM Observation Specification manual.
Spurious comments are easy, looking stuff up is tough.
That is also something really hard to measure correctly. There are many sources of error that are hard to correct for.
The Central Limit Theorem smooths any errors. Decades of observation data make instrument errors very easy to spot.
In recent decades daily MODIS (satellite) polar orbit overpasses provide air column and ground temp data that infills station data (from 1900 onwards).
There's a science to ground truthing, error detection, and data correction.
Here's the gross single number continent wide average over a century: http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi
It's not hard to find raw data, finer grids, methodology, etc.
Only sometimes. It is easier to measure in cities, and thus introduce bias based on whatever pavement is populate.
There is a lot of data, and the people who measure this (or at least some of them) are aware of the issues and so correct for them. However you cannot just blindly apply the central limit theorem.
Who said anything about blindly?
Apart from yourself, implying that happens as a matter of course?
Can you elaborate on that? Why would it be significant and what could it mean?
it would mean it was warmer.
Really? That's pretty horrible understanding of stats you have there. By your logic, it makes no sense to say that the fertility rate is 1.81 and has changed by 0.8 to now be 1.73 because a woman can either give birth to 1 or 2 kids.
We do measure Earth's average temperature for what it's worth and while different metrics might give different results, the absolute value is not really useful. What is useful is the change in that metric. And if our global temperatures change by 0.1C by any one metric, it is a very significant change given that the metric is well designed. And yes, it is possible to design a good metric.
The median is not the message!
Economic class is highly correlated with social, religious, ethnic, tribal class. If there are more social, religious, ethnic, tribal classes in a single country (i.e. the country is diverse) then in another, then you do need to sample more of the groups to get sample means free from systematic bias.
Simple example: image you are asked to compute the mean diameter of all balls in each of two bags. You open the first bag, and it is all blue balls, and they all look very close in radius. So you measure a few and call it a day. You open the second bag, and there are balls of about 50 different colors, and it seems like all the colors have different radius. So, then to get a good result, you need to measure almost the diameter of most of the colors.
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Most of aid sent to India, is mostly sent to undermine the country.
Most of british aid sent to India, is sent to convert people to Christianity via missionaries. American aid to its NGOs are sent to bring about regime changes and influence elections via USAID.
etc, etc.
Not to mention India itself disburses aid money to countries across the world.
Now that USAID has been thrown under the bus, it’s actually a golden opportunity for Europe to both rethink and boost aid programs.
India is a crucial counterbalance to China. Now that the USA is retreating into internal bickering and giving up its global leadership, Europe should continue building ties with India and helping them lift people out of poverty.
I'd rather taxes were spent on people in the home nations, rather than ex-colonies or other 3rd world countries.
I also don't think countries should be spending on a space programme if they are still accepting aid.
They are not accepting aid.
Read this : https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/india-tells-uk-we-dont-need-your-f...
It’s not Indian newspaper, its british newspaper. They’ve been asking UK to stop the aid since 2008, It’s being sent out of corruption deals between UK politicians and local special interest groups who are friends with those politicians.
India never asked for any of these aids. The total aid India receives is smaller than the bloody fertiliser SUBSIDY budget of the country.
It’s literally trinkets and they actively do not want it. India also banned foreign contributions and aid money being sent to its local NGOs without central government permission, just to put a stop to this.
Makes sense. I hope we stop that and the disguised aid by offering preferential terms on work visas etc.
>disguised aid by offering preferential terms on work visas etc. How on earth is a policy encouraging brain-drain aid??
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India's government doesn't accept aid, so whatever "aid" is being sent is to shady institutions anyway. Stopping this "aid" will only net the country a positive impact.
That's a strange claim. A quick Google will provide all kinds of data on the aid being sent to India from multiple countries. The recent "USAID kerfuffle" also surfaced all the instances of the current government accepting USAID funding, e.g. https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/22/before-bjps-usaid-out...
But in case you think it's going to "shady institutions" please be aware that the government instituted the FCRA to have complete control over where the money goes: https://kajalbasu.substack.com/p/usaid-and-the-modi-governme...
Something not talked about much in the press is how much FCRA has hurt NGOs and non-profits operating in India. From personal experience: I tried to get my US-based employer to match my donation to a local non-profit in India, which didn't work out because FCRA regulations basically made it a non-starter.