This will need a longer debate, which I might join later tonight given the time I have. I agree that the median is bad, but disagree that it is as bad as the original post made it out to be, some amount of exaggeration is fine as a rhetoric device but overdone at the least it misinforms.

EDIT: Given the downvotes I must have rubbed someone the wrong way.

When you compare you do need to take into account all the axes, I would be interested in knowing a train system that carries as many commuters for comparable price and profitably (as far as I recall the train system is indeed profitable, dont know if they receive subsidies or not). You cannot isolate services from who are going to use it and their buying power.

I will also posit that that your perception of the median is very different from mine. I speak from personal experience living in several cities/towns in India. Now I have learned enough not to extrapolate. The other thing that we disagree on is that you brush aside the variance saying India is large and variance is natural. I think (a) the mainstream western audience is not familiar with this level of variance and (b) the variance is grossly un-reported.

So my post was mostly a way of caution not a rebuttal of the original. Your link illustrates my point well. I doubt that even after accounting for its size that people will expect such a variance in sex ratio.

Oh and make no mistake, it has nothing to do with being busy or crowded. Delhi is busy and crowded too, but for a girl that does not prevent one from getting groped. Forget pedestrians, when my sister drives in Delhi/Kolkata other drivers will be trying to harass her by driving aggressively, the traffic cop will try to take advantage. Absolutely none of that happens in Chennai.

I cannot speak about your compulsions, but all I can say is that I have obtained a drivers license, a passport and renewed them with not a single paisa paid in bribe. In fact I had to think really hard to remember when did I bribe anyone at all, that was to load a crate in a train (and it wasnt even against the law or something). Main point is that in parts of the country you can do just fine without bribes, whereas in others its a part of life.

I havent been there in 3 years, but in my usual haunts in Kolkata garbage does get cleaned up. But again it will vary in the city as well. Yes there are open dumpsters, but no household filth accmulating on the side of the residential streets, going outside of Kolkata this actually surprised me. Compare that to say Kanpur a prominent city in one of the larger states. Its not uncommon to find open animal cadavers, excrement of all possible kind: cow, camel, pig, elephant you name it, in your day to day travel. Yeah I would run into shitting elephants stuck in a traffic jam ! Thats the variance I am talking about.

And I think you completely missed the point of comparison of corruption in India and US. And by no means I am justifying the corruption in India. It bothers me deeply that now it has become so acceptable. It is the acceptance of corruption that worries me more than the corruption itself. But, how is installation of backscatter machines not corruption. The semantics are different, the means are different, but the effect is the same. I still have not been able to decide that dollar for dollar per capita which is more corrupt USA or India. I have argued countless times that India is by far the more corrupt one, but now I am not so sure. In India it is in your face all the time, in the US its a background daemon.