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I worked on software that sent letters to Indian addresses some years ago. We saw things like:

Mr. So-and-so

Third house on the right, past the old tree

Near government building #5

Smalltown, Kerala

And then we’d do cash-on-delivery payments to these addresses. And it worked! I always imagined working for the Indian postal service would be interesting every day.

That “third house on the right, past the old tree” is far better than you often get. Often you just get a house number, where the house numbers sometimes don’t mean anything and are scattered all over the place indiscriminately (e.g. assigned in order of building), and maybe a “near landmark”… but the landmark is half a kilometre away, and there are thousands of people living in the area. Because it made more sense twenty years ago when it was bean fields, the landmark, and only twenty houses.

If you’re the Post Office, maybe you have access to actual data (not sure), but if you’re some other kind of deliverer, you definitely don’t (there isn’t any publicly available—and even the best commercial ones are completely useless in many places), and only local knowledge will help you.

That "local knowledge" tidbit reminded me : Looks like India is currently undergoing a similar transformation that Paris went through in the 19th century : when Statism becomes a social fact :

https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

(There are some arguments that Statism is actually a positive development, however it at least also has very nasty failure modes like Police State, and/or the situation where a few companies, shielded from democratic control, own everything.)

P.S.: HN discussion of the above : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20400656

P.P.S.: https://www.dw.com/en/german-town-votes-no-to-street-names/a...

Reminded me of: https://youtu.be/LdlLUogNYMw?si=0PZa-7PcAoIeuYdq&t=382

Here they show an app where you just make your order to your current location. Which I guess would make sense if Addresses are a mess, no address needed just a GPS location.

> Addresses are a mess (I won’t even try describing it), and I suspect that Google Maps has valid street addresses for a fairly small fraction of the total population, probably even under half the population in big cities. Yet quite a few things I’ve been dealing with have been using Google Maps data (based on detectable idiosyncrasies), with a couple even not allowing custom entries! In the USA these sorts of issues may be troublesome to a small fraction of the people so that government and business can largely ignore it without it inconveniencing too many people, but in India it’s sheer madness. So you know what happens instead? You just don’t deal with the dodgy phone app or website, but instead ring the company’s local agent, or go into the company’s shop, or something like that, and they bypass their broken system.

Can you give some examples and contrast those with the US?

FWIW, address-to-map-location and directions in India can be unreliable on Google Maps, and are borderline useless on Apple Maps.

Yes, the problem is that once digitalization becomes even half-workable, then it becomes an excuse to remove these "deal directly with a human being" options as a cost-cutting measure.

There ought to be laws about digital options being removed first in these situations, at least where government or businesses that operate infrastructure (like delivery companies) are concerned. (Strong laws, some laws for this already exist, but they tend to be weak and/or do not last long, since they go against the tendency of the state to grab ever more power.)