Hacker News Reader

Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com