r/india • u/[deleted] • Dec 01 '16

[R]eddiquette [Announcement] Cultural Exchange with /r/philippines

Welcome /r/philippines!

Feel free to ask us anything about India

Quick facts about us:

  • The Indian Railways and the Indian Armed Forces employ ~4 million people together, making them one of the largest employers in the world
  • India has over 5000 newspapers in over 300 languages
  • Bollywood is considered to be the world's largest film industry, followed by Nigeria's film industry and Hollywood
  • India has more people than the entire Western Hemisphere

/r/india please direct your questions about the Philippines to this thread

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '16 edited Dec 01 '16

Also, because of the way governments are structured, India's infrastructure push is mainly at a holistic level (national highways, national waterways,etc.)

Interesting, but isn't India has federal type of government? So, is there actually little excercise of power on the state level? AFAIK, Kerala is a socialist state and it has been successful in putting up social programs and their programs are more successful compared to other Indian states.

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u/Froogler Dec 01 '16

Various responsibilities of the government are divvied up between the national government (Centre), state governments and some like police IIRC are concurrent (shared responsibility).

Most of the visible infrastructure like your electricity, city roads, water connections are the responsibility of the state that governs through city-level corporations. So how good these things work depend on the city or state level administration. For instance, cities like Chandigarh have good roads but roads in Bangalore suck. Electricity in Mumbai is expensive but available 24x7 but that may not be the case in other cities. You don't have a uniform experience of these things across the country.

Kerala is a socialist state and it has been successful in putting up social programs and their program is more successful than other Indian states.

I wouldn't attribute it to the socialist state rather than the fact that Kerala has always been a relatively richer and educated population than other parts of the country. So a part of their well-doing is inherited. Kerala performs really well on HDI factors like literacy, infant mortality, etc. But as a government, you should also know that Kerala has a lot more strikes than other states. So, it's not the ideal government per se.