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India's "dysfunctional governmental bureaucracy and law and order system... failed miserably" because it was cloned from the westA lot of governmental bureaucracy and the mechanisms for implementing law and order was cloned from the British not the west and the "redesign" that Nehru, Ambedkar and friends attempted, tried to borrow ideas from the US and Soviets without any real success. Just one example of the inherited system failing miserably is the judicial system which is a clusterfuck today purely because it simply doesn't scale. India has 1 judge per 100,000 people, while the US has something like 1 per 1000 while Sweden has 4 per thousand. Why is this? Partly economics and partly because the British weren't really interested in a working judiciary. They wanted a kangaroo courts to put dissidents into jail, not enforce law and order.
In retrospect, the ideal solution would have been to legitimize, educate and train the native law enforcement mechanisms like the panchayats. But again, this didn't happen because the (a) the british weren't interested in solving this problem and (b) Indians were enamoured with copying the west.
> But you're also saying the government laid the groundwork over 50 years
Yes it did and not because they had any brilliant ideas or execution here. Far from it. But instead, for the first time in about 200 odd years somebody actually tried to do what was good for the Indians instead of bleeding the country dry.
> There's not much we can do now about what was done to India in the past except maybe harboring ill will against 'the west'?
This is a mistaken notion. I'm reminded of Obama quoting Faulkner, "the past isn't dead and buried and in fact it isn't even past." That's very much true today and it's important to point out that western riches weren't gained by brilliant ideas but were simply stolen at the cost of great human suffering in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.
The least we can do now is campaign for free immigration. If westerners really think all humans are equal, they shouldn't discriminate for jobs based on imaginary lines in the ground. Of course, they don't really think so and they want to preserve their stolen wealth so they won't agree to this but we mustn't be afraid to point out their hypocrisy here.
> I'd have agree with him that the main issue standing in the path of India's full recovery and health is corruption.
You're very very very mistaken. I suspect you come from a privileged middle-class background and think of the bribes you have to pay in government offices as problems that India needs to solve. Even if all corruption stopped instantly today - what would that actually achieve? Do you think the 40% of the country that's living without toilets would get access to them? And more importantly, do you they think would start using these toilets if they had access to them? There are toilets being used as godowns in various places across the country. Think about why this is. Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths? Do you think the millions of students learning from incompetent teachers would suddenly get better teaching? Would they even get better facilities? Do you think electric plants would magically appear and solve the power crises across the country?
None of the above would happen. Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetence. Incompetence is the real problem in India, and that's mainly because of a poor education system. That in turn is because you can't start from 300 million people who couldn't read/write 60 years ago and somehow magically produce the hundreds of millions of people in a highly trained and educated workforce, which is what India needs today to solve its challenges.