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Faux Indian government
A fake government office has been discovered in northern India that collected taxes, provided civic services and even handed out birth and death certificates, a report said Monday.
An office was set up outside Jhansi town in Uttar Pradesh state and 20 people were employed to carry out jobs such as street sweeping.
I liked this part:
"He later seems to have decided to carry on with the office as it did not appear to be a loss-making proposition," an unnamed police officer was quoted by Times of India saying.
The scam only came to light after some employees complained about salary problems to superiors in the actual government department, the report said.
"We were shocked to hear this as we ourselves were not aware that our department had a branch office," R. Kulkshreshtra, an official with the Jhansi Municipal Corperation, told the newspaper.
Here is the story, here is another. Thanks to Sarah Jeong for the pointer.
Or if you're interested in Indian outsourcing, try this, courtesy of Peter Clark.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 12, 2007 at 11:05 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
"Scam" indeed. Chalk up a point in favor of the anarchocapitalists.
Posted by: Riemannian at Dec 12, 2007 12:06:33 PM
Why am I not amazed? Underneath all the India Shining stories that Flattened World proponents write gushingly about, this is the reality of day-to-day India.
Till privatization of telecom came in, telephone linesmen (repairmen) employed by the government monopoly would "employ" free-lancers to address complaints. these complaints were supposed to be attended to free of cost. What the linesman would do was to collate the complaint, negotiate a bribe to attend to the problem and ask one of his "freelance" repairmen to sort it out.
Utility employees charged with reading meters routinely understate consumption, again on payment of a bribe. Sometimes they forget bills altogether, on payment of a percentage of the bill!
Customs will help you understate the value of household goods (this happened to me when I was relocating from Singapore to Mumbai), as long as you "split" the difference with them.
I could go on and on. And I am a privileged Indian with a great (publicly funded) education & MNC employeehood and have connections to speed up things. Less privileged Indians pay speed money for everything. Even for free government services.
No wonder Indian entrepreneurship is celebrated. It all began with public money getting into private pockets and that is a roaring business.
Kudos!
Posted by: Sushobhan Mukherjee at Dec 12, 2007 12:12:27 PM
Tyler,
Isn't this sort of the thing that Robb was talking about in Brave New War?
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at Dec 12, 2007 12:54:00 PM
Wonderful. This kind of free-spirited entrepreneurialism is precisely why I prefer investing in India to China.
Posted by: jag at Dec 12, 2007 1:40:13 PM
If they were collecting taxes and performing services, weren't they actually the government?
Posted by: John Payne at Dec 12, 2007 1:49:08 PM
"He later seems to have decided to carry on with the office as it did not appear to be a loss-making proposition"
This is pretty much the way most governments develop, isn't it?
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Dec 12, 2007 2:41:34 PM
That's the beauty of this, instead of being for power/influence/whateverthereasontheassholesingovernementdoitfor the vital functions are government are driven by profit, and regulated by the actual desires of the "tax" payers.
Posted by: Joseph Becker at Dec 13, 2007 12:28:55 AM
lol. wonderful. Would be interesting to know, whether they gave actual birth/death certificates
Posted by: Deane at Dec 13, 2007 9:15:41 AM
My favorite part of this whole thing is that the government employees led the revolt against the government policies, not the taxpayers.
Posted by: mike at Dec 13, 2007 1:38:31 PM
Joseph Becker,
if the government were driven by profit and "tax" payers (i.e. you put that in quotes because it's apparently not really taxation), why do there need to be so many guns pointed at the citizens?
You're right that people in government are driven by profit, like people in companies are... except governments have the police and military to help them earn those profits.
Posted by: Chris at Dec 13, 2007 2:50:27 PM
there was another instance of a faux bank branch of a psu bank in some village in bihar that flourished for about an year doing business that banks did, opening accounts,depositing money etc and one fine day fled with all the money. why aren't the local authorities are more alert.
vikrant sinha
Posted by: at Dec 16, 2007 8:01:44 AM
It seems to me that this "government" actually delivered the services the "taxpayers" paid for. He had to deliver the promised services or be found out. Clearly he delivered well because the customers/taxpayers did not complain. The workers complained because they thought they were underpaid. And they probably were by India standards as they were expected to show up and actually work.
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