In the short to medium term however investing in India is extremely risky. The primary reason is lack of trust and dishonesty at a fundamental level.
Law enforcement and judiciary are a joke. I heard it’s not uncommon for court cases to take 20-30 years. The institutions that promote a trustworthy transactions are nearly absent or ineffective.
For busuinesses there are many tribunals which genrally resolve matters on fast track basis , and if some case has legal complications there are fast track courts instituted for the same
Maybe a country controlling the internetworked currency exchanges of their currency should be a 21st century equivalent to minting currency.
I remember when the Nepal's royal family was massacred. We had all our telephone connections cut for 5 days with full blown curfews. They were necessary to stop riots, rumor mongering, and knee jerk reaction of people to the horrible news.
I really don't see an argument that suggests that China style Censorship is not coming for everyone.
Here are my facts and inferences:
1) Data/content is without inherent Good/Evil value. A sentence "Jihad!" is only terror affiliated if it shows up in a specific context. It could be part of a sarcastic comment for all you know.
2) This context sensitivity creates means that you can rarely identify what is actually dangerous speech given raw data. You need contextual information (person speaking it, lists of people associated with terror networks etc.)
3) Virality - People in India for example, are busy sharing videos of child abductions which are leading to lynchings of innocents in villages. Except those videos are concoted out of Mexican gang videos, health and safety videos, and frames from other countries.
There is no way to stop this, without breaking past the "intent" barrier inherent to all information.
4) Better understanding of human neural weak spots. We are constantly learning to hack human brains - gamification, loot boxes, attention sucking websites, "Addictive UI/UX". We are simply driven by business need to evolve firms and practices that are best able to survive in the substrate that businesses operate in - which is Humanity. Sex sells was true years ago, today we can do Sex sells in a personalized and automated manner to everyone with a cell phone.
Given these basic factors, virality, impossibility to identify intent, human neural hacking, we create a perfect storm.
Nations can never defend against incoming fake news, hoaxes, psych warfare, riot inducing whats app messages, gossip and more.
The only way to stop this is to go from black lists (let people be on a "free net" and then take down blacklisted content) to a white list (let people only stay on a safe internet, and ensure nothing else gets in.)
This is what China does, and while not fool proof (people still find ways to share their dissatisfaction) its not bad from a central government perspective.
Most Chinese wouldn't know about Tianmen square for example, and are largely happy with the Government. Issues which do crop up with Government satisfaction can be resolved by finding a person responsible and then executing that person.
As long as you keep the system running (economic and job growth) most people will be happy.
Even in a worse case scenario, dissent will be hard to coalesce into outright rebellion.
I don't see how nations wont be driven to copying this model given the success of Brexit, Trump market spam, Virality of Hate speech and forums etc.
Further, techies on places like HN regularly keep moving the needle forward to make such technology easier to implement. I spoke to someone on a flight a while ago who is busy helping create language translation data bases which get used for predictive text recognition.
This reduces the "armor" or "camouflage" that non english languages had when dealing with authorities - eventually with a good dictionary, you can start making more sophisticated tools to identify language patterns and put them to a halt.
I see the above used every day when moderators put it to good use on forums like HN and Reddit. But thats a few evolutions away to being applied to larger scales (unless there is some genuine technical issue which prevents this - which will be seem as a "business opportunity" for someone to crack)
I have spent time moderating forums, I listen and read up on internet arcana and history, have met and speak with people who work on censorship in India, have friends in policy, and so on. I can only call this a hobby, but everything I have seen in multiple realms, I see nothing substantial, so far, which contradicts this thesis.
I see China as the likely END result of all nations, because of our good intentions.
The upper house in parliament does not have equal representation for all states, unlike the US Senate. Moreover the central government can dismiss the state government on the flimsiest of grounds.
The buerocracy is deeply entrenched in policy making and execution, where it should be largely in the hands of the peoples representatives.
The courts are temperamental and inconsistent in interpreting the constitution.
The constitution itself is a shaky document, which does not guarantee protections to the citizens with sufficient absoluteness. Many provisions were defined ambiguously.
This is not true, as most of the day to day life of normal Indians is affected by their local municipal corporation, then district, state and finally Central.
The central government takes up far too much of the mind space of most educated Indians for some reasons, but the poor and middle class who depend far more on local connections consolidate actual power in the local MLA.
> The upper house in parliament Is effectively a formality check for certain legislation. IF the same bill is sent back to the Upper house of the Centre they have to pass it.
> The courts are temperamental and inconsistent in interpreting the constitution.
This is only the supreme court, and that is their role - the larger malaise is the underfunding and unavailability of people to actually be good judges in the lower courts.
This is what is one of the corner stones of the problems the country faces: Actual timely justice.
This follows up with lack of independence and funding of police - however this will never become a core poll issue because the nation can constantly be distracted by a laundry list of issues which politicians can bring up.
IN general, people worry more about Center when they should be focusing on local elections.
The Government may pass strong Right to Information laws, but implementation is up to the States - and there you can see exactly the power States have.
The over focus on Central elections by citizenry gives state governments the ability to do what they please with impunity.
Much to the disappointment of neo-liberals, we have discovered that there is no correlation between democracy, and economic development.
Compare China and India, Cuba and Haiti, South Korea before, and after Democratic reforms... The form of government is tangential.
[0]https://ewn.co.za/2019/02/12/zimbabwe-s-vice-president-recei...
I do think its an important question and one that should be answered in good faith. If we do believe that democracy does not hinder but perhaps help economic development, we should know that. If it does hinder, we should ask: is the price paid worth it?
Though I do think there may be an inhibition of development for economics that accept austerity and classical international investments advice.
Heh, well that's because India doesn't exactly have a lot of respect for US pharma IP. Which is fine, but don't go giving India the credit for stolen IP.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/04/08/indias...
"Credit guarantee is one of the most significant positive links between economic growth and democracy. The marginal effects of credit guarantee and foreign direct investment inflows are stronger in democratic countries than they are in non-democratic ones."
China only experienced massive economic success after liberalizing its markets. For that matter, so did India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...) South Korea is essentially an American vassal state. Cuba is clearly not an economic success story, but of course if you compare it to the poorest country in the hemisphere (Haiti,) it comes out slightly ahead.
Ultimately what matters is whether your government is open to free trade and liberalized markets, and has enough legitimacy to enforce the rule of law (and attract foreign investment)- and has a healthy relationship with the United States. All of these are strongly correlated with democratic governments.
But they do or at least they will. At some point the next quality of life improvement you want is to be able to openly express ideas and not have somebody decide your life for you without input from you.
And that's the horrible conclusion I get from that fact: technology has always been celebrated as tool of liberation, but the CPC has effectively yielded it as a tool of oppression. And if the CPC can do it, why not other countries?
A bow and arrow can be an effective way to feed your family, or a tool or warfare that changed the outcome of many battles. Advances in textiles can be useful for keeping people warm in winter, or advanced armors with metal sewn inside.
It's not even as simple as a tool shifting from one thing to another either. Bows shifted from a hunting tool, to a tool of warfare, until eventually being relegated to sports equipment for the most part in the modern age. Medieval and Japanese swords used to be the heights of military technology, now they're collector curios.
I'm not sure of any technology that can be used purely for "good" or "bad", or even for one thing at all. The world doesn't often follow absolutes, so we shouldn't fall into the trap of believing absolutes when presented to us. At least not without a lot of justification and the requisite caveats.
As for locals, greasing palms is the only way to get a business going. Or anything done, really.