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Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

I doubt the excuse of "security concerns". I think it's more likely that the government didn't want it to be so easy for the rest of the world to see what life was like on the ground. Taking random clicks through Street View, it looks postapocalyptic.

(I'm not blaming it on the people, although I think littering is a choice; almost certainly this is a top-down problem, where corruption in all levels of government is bleeding so much financing away from the people that public services are not operating anywhere close to their potential.)

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This makes zero sense. India isn’t North Korea. If you want to see what life on the ground is like, you can just... visit the country. No one’s stopping anyone from doing that.

The security concerns may be overblown (although I can understand why given so many terror attacks in the past), but stopping non-Indian companies from mapping the country so rest of world shouldn’t see the littering sounds like nonsense.

> you can just... visit the country

Obviously. But it's considerably easier for anyone with an internet connection to now be able to take a virtual tour; thus, it is much more exposed.

What the street views illustrate is how far behind the key infrastructure is. With a population that is motivated and willing to work hard, it suggests failures at the government level. This has been a global topic for 10 years, but it does not seem to have changed much (while the population has significantly increased).

Street views everywhere just make it easier for management failures to be seen and analyzed. This will hopefully result in some changes and improvements.

Some time ago I had asked one of my Indian friends (who manages a software team in India and the US and has travelled the world, so he has a varied perspective) what he thinks is the biggest barrier to India's advancement? He said "Corruption. The bureaucracy and the government have so much corruption at so many levels". This sounds like a different way to state your mention of "management failures". Hopefully the additional worldwide scrutiny is a motivator for change.

I wanted to say corruption, because that's usually a simple root cause of many such failures... whether it's corruption because of nepotism or graft or just pure theft, the result is delivering something far less than should have been achievable.

However, on the global corruption scale, India is "not so bad". Even so, "not so bad" when applied to a billion+ people is bad.

“Corruption” is an easy scapegoat because it allows the electorate to believe that a new, clean and strong politician can solve all their problems. The reality is combination of low civic sense (why litter in the first place?), under-resourced enforcement (who is going to stop me from littering?), limited funding for infrastructure because of a lack of independent revenue sources available to city administrations, and bad policy that makes city administration effectively a puppet of the state (provincial) governments. In all this, corruption plays a role in making a bad situation worse.

Couldn't have put it better

I think you’re really overestimating Street View’s impact. Anyone remotely interested in India is already aware of how far behind the key infrastructure is and how governments have failed them. Street View is the last thing they will be looking at for confirmation.

Governments haven’t cared about failures when actual users of the infrastructure (Indian citizens) have complained. Things aren’t going to change because Google is now showing how streets look like for someone outside India.

> Things aren’t going to change because Google is now showing how streets look like for someone outside India.

One can hope that the ease of checking up on ground-level progress would help speed improvement, because global financing organizations might require some OKRs as a condition of participating in financing things or providing aid.

> although I can understand why given so many terror attacks in the past

Yeah like India has the highest terror attack rate in the world.

It looks just like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Brazil etc. It’s not post apocalyptic, that’s what a lower standard of living looks like. It’s also deceptive. I would say Mumbai is an amazing place to live in, but it wouldn’t be for someone from the first world that looks for very specific metrics of standard. It’s chaotic but it gets the fundamentals right. It’s safe, it’s an economic powerhouse and you can find literally anything you would in the first world.

> Thailand

I disagree. Granted Thailand is big, and Bangkok itself is huge, so I've only seen small parts of a few cities in the country. But while I definitely saw poverty and ramshackle structures, litter was relatively minor. In fact, I've seen worse litter in places in some regions of western Europe. I've definitely seen some bad litter in places in large US cities.

I've never seen anything like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7O0jbTRD7Y

edit - I challenged myself to try to find some really dirty parts of bangkok in street view. I didn't find a good example yet, but I had to laugh when while searching for an example of litter, I instead found a woman cleaning trash - https://www.google.com/maps/@13.7627877,100.4965608,3a,64.2y...

Litter was a much, much bigger problem than it currently is in Indian cities. It’s on the right trajectory. I went to Thailand 8 years ago and there was tons of litter, maybe it was a quick turnaround.

This is from a few years ago— https://youtu.be/hufC33MvmSw

That video is of a rubbish dump, and it's talking about the amount of trash produced by Bangkok. And as Bangkok has about 10 million people, large amounts of trash are expected.

With some quick searching, I found estimates that the US per capita generates between 2 and 7 kg of waste per day per person. Thailand's number is less than 2kg.

I think the special challenge of a city like Bangkok is how rapidly it grew. But as evidenced by improvements in public transport over the last decade, I wouldn't be surprised if waste management had also improved. So perhaps it was much dirtier in the past.

And let's not forget tourism. 22 million people visit Bangkok per year, compared to 14 million for NYC. That's a lot of extra garbage that probably is not counted in the per capita figured.

>walk only on the footpath

They have footpaths?

You should know that Google street view picked up traction around the same time the Mumbai attacks happened.

And that attack was largely coordinated thanks to extensive recce of the city by David headley.

Security concerns were valid because the government had the infrastructure to check the legitimacy of every foreigner entering the country. But a Headley-like recce could be possibly done by anyone from anywhere without the government knowing it.

Yes, there are workarounds, but The government was not wrong in taking it's time in giving clearance to something like this

Indeed, there is a moat around india which stopped people coming in till yesterday to see the postapocalyptic land.

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