Thoughts on India
Having returned to the US from a month long trip in India I must say that there are a few things that I have to jot down about my experience. India as an up and coming economy is right now in flux. It has a wonderful mobile infrastructure, but roads and electricity are still highly unreliable, English is still quite foreign to most people, and there is a basic disregard by most people to maintain the infrastructure that they are given.
There is a mobile phone in everyone's hands from the busy doctor to the menial worker to rural farm worker. The mobile has become a necessity for life where landlines are not even considered anymore. However, this networking that is possible gives way when we look that the most basic infrastructure is still lacking. Electricity in the rural areas is cut daily during the peak hours for hours on end and while the city is reliable there too the power goes off sporadicly. However, personally I think the infrastructure can be improved by subsidising solar panels. This is beneficial since power is usually cut during the afternoon (when it is the hottest and also when the sun is shining the most). This wasted natural resource could allow India to build a decentralized power grid powered by the sun. Further, by also providing an income for those who install the solar panels there is an incentive to install the panels.
There needs to be strict enforcement of traffic rules as right now the roads of India are a free for all! When you see a pedestrian on the street the goal is to go faster not slower until you are about to hit the person at which point you break. Further, all forms of vechicles are allowed on the roads from human driven rickshaws, cow pulled wagons, buses, construction vechicles and even camels (I saw some on the main road in Hyderabad). I am not saying that these vechicles cannot use the roads, by all means they can, but the way that they utilize the roads create traffic jams and do no one any good. Everyone wants to be the lord of the road and when they move on the road they tend to behave that way, for example, a biker going right in the middle of the road so that a faster moving vechicle cannot pass easily. By stingently regulating this traffic there can be an improvement as the roads are wide to allow efficient flows, it's just the free for all on the roads prevent it.
India needs to improve English as a medium of communication. Right now not everyone speaks Hindi and not everyone speaks the native language so there are at times disconnects between the two. For example, in the airport the guards speak Hindi but not Telugu and when coming from a Andhra airport Telugu should be a required language as much as Kannada should be a required language at the Bangalore airport or Tamil at the Chennai airport. But English should be the required language of all official personel and it should be a requirement.
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