Note: This isn't supposed to be a political comment. I don't like politics and I don't want to indulge in it neither am I interested in patriotism and other such things. What I do care about is the suffering of human beings and finding solutions for their problems. This comment is such an observation of a pressing problem I see around me.

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This is precisely why I don't want to stay in India beyond a certain point. This isn't just something about privacy, but it's the symptom of a cancer that's spreading through the system. That might sound like a sweeping statement, but it isn't. The Indian state is slowly disintegrating due to the cause and effect caused by decades of corruption (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India ) and growing discontent.

As of now in India there are Kashmir separatists to the north who want to overthrow direct rule of the Indian state after decades of conflict and the rise of oppressive practices by the Indian state (see: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,PAK,,3ae6a8558,0... ). I see stories like these ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7973499...) depressingly often in the news. These people are want a solution and they are willing to spill blood for it.

In the south there is a growing communist insurgency consisting of impoverished people who have been long denied their rights and have taken up arms in protest (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite-Maoist_insurgency ). The interesting thing is that these groups have entrenched their power by acting like an ad-hoc government collecting taxes, dispensing justice and winning the confidence of the villagers through goodwill schemes that the government should have implemented.

What fuels it is the fact that outside the metros there is no visible infrastructure development and government functioning is reduced to the distribution of voter cards. Most people attribute this to a lack of resources, but that isn't quite true. More than $ 125 mil. are spent on creating rural health centers yearly and budgets are allocated based upon need by bureaucrats with little or no accountability to the people there are supposed to serve [disclaimer: my mother is such a bureaucrat and I read her files at times]. However, no one knows what's going on "over there" on the ground and recent reports aren't too encouraging. In fact, it's treated as a fact that most of the allocated money is swished off into a few pockets through a network of scams that often prey upon the illiterate.

Anecdotally, I know of villages just a few hours outside New Delhi in which ingenious scams take place. For example, the state has promised food and ration for school going children with uniforms. So, what happens on the ground is that a few officials come together and sell the provisions on the open market and buy substandard food instead. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the fact that the education system in the villages is so broken that many of it's graduate are still effectively illiterate. In fact, the teachers themselves under new schemes are often high school graduates who have been taught under the same system.

The list goes on and on, but the trend in general is that these "facts of indian life" come together to form a potent environment which ferments chaos. What will emerge out of this chaos is something that no one can predict, but what is certain that India won't have a congenial atmosphere necessary for stability and wealth creation (wealth over here means things that matter, not money). What is far more disturbing is that few are willing to even look at the problem let alone start developing solutions for it.

tl;dr: Basically, the odds aren't on the PR guys side.