5 ms·
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
by ra7 4y ago
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.
- z9znz 4y ago> 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.
- paxunix 4y agoSome 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.
- z9znz 4y agoI 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.
- blueblisters 4y ago“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.
- dartharva 4y agoCouldn't have put it better
- ra7 4y agoI 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.
- z9znz 4y ago> 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- selfhoster69 4y ago> 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.