Toilets and Cellphones
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
NEW YORK — I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cellphones in India than toilets. Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.
This can be seen as skewed development favoring private networks over the public good. It can be seen as an example of markets outstripping governments: Nimble cellphone companies profit while lumbering Indian authorities are unable even to stop the propagation of water-borne disease through defecation in the open. Or it can be seen merely as the choice Indians have made about their priorities.
What is certain is that those half-billion Indians with cellphones — and they will be a billion within the next decade — have begun to inhabit parallel universes. There is their mental community, perhaps including regular contact with far-flung family members in London or Louisville. Then there is their physical community, with its tattered village poverty and bureaucratic inertia. Texts fly. Sanitation dies.
In some measure this duality is the modern condition. It brings an attendant schizophrenia about the state and government.
(More here.)
NYT
NEW YORK — I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cellphones in India than toilets. Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.
This can be seen as skewed development favoring private networks over the public good. It can be seen as an example of markets outstripping governments: Nimble cellphone companies profit while lumbering Indian authorities are unable even to stop the propagation of water-borne disease through defecation in the open. Or it can be seen merely as the choice Indians have made about their priorities.
What is certain is that those half-billion Indians with cellphones — and they will be a billion within the next decade — have begun to inhabit parallel universes. There is their mental community, perhaps including regular contact with far-flung family members in London or Louisville. Then there is their physical community, with its tattered village poverty and bureaucratic inertia. Texts fly. Sanitation dies.
In some measure this duality is the modern condition. It brings an attendant schizophrenia about the state and government.
(More here.)
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