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Comment by r0h1n | Hacker News Reader

As an Indian I can only add that I simultaneously feel a sense of pride (at how advanced the Indus Valley civilization was) and shame (at the fact that modern India is still rediscovering concepts like well-planned cities and sewage/water supply 2000 years later).

I live in a fairly well-off suburb of south Bangalore that has NO municipal sewage or water supply. Mine isn't an isolated case either as large parts of Bangalore have neither. Also, large parts of Gurgaon, arguably India's largest new city.

So how do we make by? Apartment communities have their own sewage & waste water treatment plants; rain-water harvesting; private garbage disposal (we segregate into multiple categories); drinking water brought in by water tankers that pump ground water (which the law doesn't really protect).

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From a certain perspective I feel the same way about present day India. Half the food supply is eaten by rodents. Religious ideas cause the main river to be infectious. But I have hope that they will actually do something different than the West.

Centralized water supplies require a lot of money and upkeep. They lose water to evaporation. Central sewers and water are nice, but can lead to safety issues if the water pressure drops.

I would like to see India expand modern waste management ideas like composting toilets and local water collection. Depending on where the city is located a combination of ground water and rain water could provide 70-80% of the water needs. Recycling of potable to non-potable water could help stretch that even more.

To me India feels rather Confederate in its organization. I wonder if that would allow regional governors more autonomy to experiment with new ideas and techniques.

4500 years later, not 2000 years.

But India is not alone. Europe also experienced civilization reversion. As did East Asia. As did the Americas.

Sorry, my bad.

Can you explain "civilization reversion"?

The Fall of Rome, I'd imagine.

The Bronze Age collapse as well.

The one between the "Heroic" age of Mycenae and Troy and the later "Classical" Grrece?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

They're projecting their values onto the past.

One wonders how much further advanced India would be today if not for the systematic de-industrialization performed by the British.

Flooding the market with Manchester cotton and blocking silk exports might have shifted village weavers back to agriculture, but there's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that India was remotely close to industrialisation when the British arrived (which in the case of the deservedly much-maligned East India company is some decades before Britain was close to industrialisation, when the UK already enjoyed much higher per capita income levels).

It's not as if Britain imported or invented India's extremes of social stratification. Ultimately it takes more than skilled silk weavers and a flair for building palaces to allow large scale industrial organization.

it is interesting to see the contrast of India and China vs. Japan which very convincingly announced itself as a major industrial power in 1904 Russian-Japan war.

http://www.samurai-archives.com/tme.html

"What followed, from 1867 to 1912, remains unparalleled in history.

...

... the scientific and industrial revolutions had raged around the blissfully unaware Japanese. This had to change for Japan to compete in the modern world. Accordingly, the oligarchs set the nation upon a course of modernization which would produce dramatic results. The first step was to foster a sense of nationalism and unity."

Interesting that "nationalism and unity" have been observed during many "leaps forward" in other countries too.

Where do you think the venture capital for investing and kick starting the industrial revolution came for? All the prizes and aristocracy having leisure to study science needed money. And India was the jewel in the crown for Britain.

roughly comes down to GDP per capita.

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