![]() The most important achievement of America’s 19th-century cities was their sewers and waterworks that saved thousands of lives. Today, approximately half of Mumbai’s residents do not have reliable access to working toilets.Ī 2003 study classified 70 percent of the water samples from one ward in particular as undrinkable. A cholera epidemic is a lot more dangerous than a crime wave. ![]() The most important task of city government is to provide clean water. Today, the mismanagement of India’s cities not only reduces quality of life but limits urban growth and thereby slows the economic Into small areas, there is an increased need for an effective public sector. The great problem with urban living, however, is that when many people crowd India will get rich not in its villages, but in its cities and towns, where people can connect with each other and with the global economy. His latest mandate as an opportunity to improve delivery of the public sector basics, like clean water, while continuing to reduce other, unnecessary interventions. The just re-elected prime minister, Manmohan Singh, deserves enormous credit for dismantling much of the “license raj” that was the unfortunate legacy of Nehru and his progeny. is less dependent on public infrastructure, like roads and electricity. Suspect that India’s information technology has been so much more successful than its manufacturing because I.T. The energy and entrepreneurship of India’s private sector, both in the shiny office parks of Bangalore and in the dusty streets of Dharavi, only makes India’s public sector problems more frustrating. UnlessĪ government manages to provide clean water to its poorest citizens, it should refrain from any new barrier to international trade, complex nationalization scheme or draconian zoning laws. I have a moderate, and only somewhat facetious, libertarian progressive proposal. So why do governments that cannot manage the basics of public hygiene think that they can micro-manage an economy? It isn’t wise to start teaching children calculus before they have mastered long division, and it is not prudent to begin long division until addition and subtraction are, more or less, under control. He recently returned from India, where he was researching a book on cities. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard.
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