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The Problem behind the Problem


 I’ve been thinking about this for a while — why do we talk about littering in India like it’s only a behavior problem? Every time the topic comes up, people say things like “we need awareness” or “we need better technology.” But when I look around, it doesn’t feel like a lack of awareness. It feels like something deeper, something that runs through the system itself.

The solution to India's littering problem is not fancy technology. You can introduce as much technology as you want in India, but you will not solve the littering problem unless you solve the deeper issue, the root cause of the problem. See, in India there's a huge gigantic problem. What is that problem? It's what nobody wants to speak about. You will have government servants with a salary of 30,000-40,000 rupees a month, 3-4 lakhs rupees a year who own huge bungalows. Everyone knows that right? You have all these public works that happen every year in various facilities in India. Every year they dig up the roads, every year they lay a new road. In 6 months the road is again crumbled up. Again they will dig up the road. What is all this?

It's corruption.

The entire system looks like hypothetically geared towards corruption. Huge amounts of money is allocated every year to various budgets and where does most of the money go? In such a situation, nothing is going to be solved. You will have dustbins or trash bins which are not collected. Some places you don't even have trash bins. So, people have to litter.

When people see that the system is working against them, when they see the system is so unfair where people do no work but earn so much money then people get demoralized and they stop following the rules.

Right?

So what is the solution? The solution is a cleanup, not of the littering problem first but of the deep defects and deficiencies in our system. Once you solve the corruption problem, enforcement of the rules will be done properly. Right now there is no enforcement of the rules. No one cares. 6 months ago, people were talking about pigeons are a menace to India. Now stray dogs are a menace to India. The thing is they'll keep talking about it. But because of the incredible inefficiency of the Indian system, nothing will be done about this. The only thing that's preventing a genocide of dogs in India is the incredible inefficiency of the Indian system that doesn't care about what needs to be done. It’s just all about slogans and headlines and all that. But every Indian knows what actually is happening, right? It's all about performing a little bit of actions. That's it. So that is the root cause of all the problems in India. The moment you clean up the system, the littering and every problem in India will be dealt with an iron fist.

 

Comments

  1. Such a powerful and well-crafted post. Your writing makes people pause and reflect—much needed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, India's biggest root cause is corruption.

    ReplyDelete

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