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Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

This is like the boiler room stuff from "Wolf of Wall Street". Unfortunately it is not reviled rather held in awe.

One thing which is never talked about in these articles is the failure of Indian government (past and present) to find effective family planning policies. Population growth is through the roof and hence unemployment is huge. With not much left in terms of job prospects lot of people turn to shady stuff.

And while the article makes a case for IRS and Microsoft scams, slowly these guys are running domestic scams too. Lot of people receive calls claiming to be from a particular bank/digital wallet company/phone provider. The victims are asked to share the OTP sent to their mobile for "verification". These OTPs are mainly for digital wallets. Once the scammers reset the password they withdraw or spend most of the money in the wallets.

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> With not much left in terms of job prospects lot of people turn to shady stuff.

Plenty of opportunity out there in the farms, most of my friends have moved back to India to start (new-ish) farming practices.

It's this pervasive attitude that cities will provide you with growth, a big salary package and all for a degree that you've not been trained well in. Only a few universities in India are actually universities. The others are just as abhorrent money making scams as these call centers, comparable to Trump's University.

I propose we train them in maintaining our agrarian economy well, we're still reliant on the monsoon for many crops, which is not acceptable for this day and age. And most of all, this will get you votes, this will get you the MOST votes.

India only has a 1.2% population growth rate including an aging population (https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the...) which is down from 2.2% in 1980 and well below it's ~7% GDP growth rate.

They are simply dealing with the normal issues for a rapidly developing nation. Plus the new generation entering the work force is based on their population growth rate ~20 years ago.

I am not sure what is the data source on statista but the last census happened in 2011:

http://www.simplydecoded.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TH01...

The last decade was the only one where the population growth has slowed. And even then the growth was ~17% in 10 years.

17% over a decade works out to 1.58% every year

You can get good data by looking at birth and death records in the short term. Census is needed to normalize things over time, but they are hardly needed every year.

This has a nice visualisation:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/2017/

> One thing which is never talked about in these articles is the failure of Indian government (past and present) to find effective family planning policies. Population growth is through the roof and hence unemployment is huge.

Looking at the actual data https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... it's not clear that the government could have found more effective family planning policies, save for rather draconic China-like measures.

Indeed, they've actually done fairly well with population growth imo in recent years. Many states are at or below tfr replacement level as seen here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_ferti... . It's the poorest states that still have challenges and even then overall growth continues to trend downwards. Population momentum is a problem but can't do much about that now. Interestingly all of the people mentioned in the article who moved to Delhi to become part of the scamming are from the red (high tfr) states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but that may just be a coincidence.

All this seems a dark side of democracy in a not well educated country. All the political parties do short term work just enough to win the next election and no one cares to plans long term. And when people are not educated they just don't get complicated perspective, all that understand is here and now leading to all short term band-aid solutions which are harmful for the long term.

> All the political parties do short term work just enough to win the next election and no one cares to plans long term. People just don't get complicated perspective, all that understand is here and now leading to all short term band-aid solutions which are harmful for the long term.

You're describing all democracies, in every country. Education has nothing to do with it. It's a well-studied structural problem with democratic rule in general.

This is clearly not true. Democracies often plan for the future, but only less so sometimes, such as when populism abounds and the democracy is too direct. Don't fall down the fallacy hole of 'authoritarianism like China or Singapore must be better.'

> Don't fall down the fallacy hole of 'authoritarianism like China or Singapore must be better.'

I never said that.

And besides, "authoritarianism" isn't the opposite of democracy, as evidenced by authoritarian democracies.

OK, i'm glad you weren't meaning that: many who say such things do, and perhaps I was cautioning by inference. Good point re authoritarian pseudo-democracies. what counts as representation is a difficult and complex issue.

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