India’s Transition: Choice, Competition, and Individual Dignity

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOZuRhNETrU Duration: 405.0s

Parth Shah (00:04): I had not realized how much impact on a personal life, right, that the current system of governance has. Right? So we talk about the statism and then how state dominates the economy and the reserve of services to citizens. Right? We think the more in terms of at least, was thinking more in terms of the larger system principles and principles of philosophy and design in a way. Right? And then how do you create institutions that would support freedom and to support people’s desire to achieve best in their lives? I think coming to India, I so the first experience that made me sort of you know, brought me face to face. This is not just about it’s not about politics. It’s not about economics. It’s not about political sort of principles. It’s so much about your personal life. So I wanted to be independent just like I was, you know, running in my own apartment in The US. I thought I can do the same with a single person, the small apartment that I had in Delhi. But, you know, I, of course, clean my own toilet, clean my own bathrooms, did the for quite some time on my own to maintain the apartment. And that was when has bigger problem, frankly. I could do all of those things. But when I had to pay my first electricity bill, right, and I sort of took the bill, went to pay the bill, and I stood in the line for almost three hours. I said, yeah. Of course, I must have forgotten. I grew up in India, obviously. Was and that time, my parents must have taken care of all these things. And I just was so shocked that, you know, you to give money. This is like, I’m not even asking for anything. I’m just doing that to give money. Right? Even to take money, government makes you wait for this many hours. And, actually, I was fortunate because some people just took pity on the effect that they realized that I was not used to this this kind of standing in queues and got me up up out of the line. But paying, let’s say, the bill, paying the telephone bill. Right? Well, luckily, I had a telephone already installed in my apartment, so that wasn’t a problem. I already had a gas connection also. That was all taken care of the apartment that I rented. But paying those bills really is felt how it makes you small just makes you lose your basic dignity, right, as a human being, right, as a citizen. And that actually had a huge impact on me in terms of my own sort of deeper understanding of why we need to fight this battle. Right? It’s not just for larger ideas, not from largest system reform, which is, of course, as I was thinking earlier, been training economics and all of that. Right? But it’s so much personal. Right? It’s so much, that each individual’s life is so directly impacted by what kind of system we put in place. Right? How we design this service delivery, in the country. And I think that was really a big learning experience in my own life. And that’s been sort of made my resolve even stronger to do what I set out to do. Of course, life has changed dramatically as you pointed out. It’s no longer the case. It was turning to to pay your bills. I think it’s largely because I think this simple principle, right, of promoting choice and competition, which is very sort of market principle. So even though you may have government provision of service, we don’t want to have government monopoly of provision of service. Right? Which is what it was in case of telecom and electricity earlier. Right? We have government companies providing those services. It’s only one place to go. It was MTNL or BSNL at the time. Right? I remember very clearly at CCS office, that, you know, a linesman would come regularly almost sometime every month to say hello, to say Right? And, you know, of course, he’s not asking for how you are doing. He’s just reminding you that your telephone is working in your office because of pain, and he needs to be given some baksheesh, some consideration for making it work. Right? And I saw I mean, we had the same linesman after a few years when the private sector was allowed to operate in telecom. Right? The same linesman in this in our office area. After when the private telecoms came in, after some time, he stopped coming to office asking for those gifts. Right? And I can see that how it has changed. Even the linesman understood that now there’s a competition. People have a choice in terms of where they want to go, and therefore, cannot extort as normally did. Right? And I think after that, we are giving him some baksheesh with sort of open heart. Right? Yes. We recognize his contribution. He’s the one who’s there at twelve at midnight, right, to fix the telephone line if it does break down. So you want to recognize his contribution, his support that he’s providing. It was much more voluntary out of goodness of the heart, out of service that we provided. Right? It wasn’t seen as extortion or a bribe that we have to pay. And I think that has been a huge change. People don’t realize that how much corruption has been eliminated just by the simple competition that we brought in, the choice that we are allowed to consumers in many of these public services, which are used to be a government monopoly earlier. I’m sort of afraid that we are not applying the same principle to other domains that we need to apply even today. Right? Why is the government supporting students as it does in case of, you know, in case of private schools as it does in case of state schools? So then opening those choices to citizens is a far better way of, giving them dignity, first of all, but also to provide better service to lower cost. Right? All the good thing that you want can come out of that process of giving more choice to citizens, and this should be a no brainer in a democracy. People are given the power to choose their own representatives. Why can’t we trust them to give power to choose their school, their hospitals? Right? And that service providers.