PPF: Pay for Public Failures

In line with the much-publicised NEP 2020, Odisha’s schoolchildren are getting a world-class education in one subject the syllabus forgot to list: Creative Fact-Checking. With thousands of mistakes across textbooks, we’ve accidentally launched India’s largest critical thinking experiment.

Who needs Olympiads when every math sum is a puzzle and every history date is a plot twist? Students get a shot of Nimbuda Nimbuda when the numbers get boring, just to keep the experiment joyous. Sarcasm aside, it has left the state embarrassed and the country stunned.

Double engine or Trouble engine?

Everyone’s trying to understand how low we had to sink to produce textbooks of such quality. It feels surreal. The incoherence reads like a Class 5 summer project done on a computer with no adult supervision. The government’s talent for engineering trouble has now turned inward — autophagy, you could call it. 

Is this an isolated case of gross neglect bordering on willful apathy, or just our local tradition? 

Try this: Name one government project, delivered by department staff, that’s actually high quality. Exclude VVIP pet projects with unlimited budgets or contractor-led showpieces. Or name one government service you can access without hitting a dozen barriers. You won’t need to look far.

Just look at a typical middle-class home. Dirty water? Buy a filter. No electricity? Buy an inverter/ generator. Polluted air? Buy an air purifier. No cooking gas? Buy an induction cooktop. Bad school? Go private or pay for tuition.

These were the services our taxes were supposed to cover. The State was supposed to deliver them. It doesn’t. It won’t. And we’ve accepted that as normal.

We slap a band-aid on systemic failure and call it a solution.

We’re probably the only people in the world who quietly pay for every government failure from our own pockets. Worse, we compete to buy the more premium version than the neighbour. We install booster pumps, drill illegal borewells, and set up private transformers — all to grab a bigger share of what should’ve been public.

The Indian middle class is the world’s largest municipal corporation.

We supply our own water, power, clean air, and education. The government just collects the subscription fee. Then it unabashedly calls the whole thing a “growing consumer economy” and taxes every RO, inverter, and purifier.

These aren’t signs of growth. They’re evidence of failure. And the State owes us answers.

India’s middle class has seceded from the Indian State. Not through protest or rebellion, but by quietly buying its way out of state failure.

That’s Shankkar Aiyar’s argument in Gated Republic (2020).

The State fails at basics — providing water, power, education, health, air, policing, and justice. Instead of fixing the system, the middle class builds a private replica. Install ROs because tap water is filthy. Buy inverters because the grid can’t cope. Pay school fees because government schools don’t teach. Hire security because the cops don’t show up. Each private fix is a “gate.” Stack them together and you get a Gated Republic — a country within a country.

You pay taxes to the State, then pay again to private providers just to live.

We don’t protest. We aspire. Then we just purchase.

The modern gated community is the logical endpoint. Why do we build them? Because they deliver what every city should - open spaces, parks, community halls, pools, libraries, recreation centres, safety, discipline, order.

We’ve privatised the very idea of a neighbourhood.

In the last few decades, we’ve fixed our offices. We’ve nearly fixed our homes. Even airports and railway stations are getting better through private partnerships. What still hurts is the space between them. Step outside your gate and you’re hit by chaos — badly designed roads, random speed breakers in every shape, potholes that qualify as modern art, unregulated traffic, unplanned sprawl. A road that’s “four-lane” on paper barely fits two cars. You’re seen dodging concave potholes and convex manholes, while both sides are choked by parked vehicles because some popular food joint runs out of a residential plot.

Whose job is it to keep public space in order? Public or private? We privatize public failures. We budget for the State’s gaps. Why?

Because protest is expensive and buying a solution is faster than fixing the system. Fighting the system takes leadership, time, energy, and the risk of retaliation by the state. We don’t have a culture of fighting for collective interest. We’d rather bribe the clerk to get our file moving than ask why the system is jammed. Individual optimization beats collective action every time. If my kid needs clean water today, a ₹15,000 RO beats a 15-year water supply reform. Taking the wrong side of the road feels fine if it helps you skip a traffic snarl. We’ve even legitimised bribing the pandas at Jagannath Temple for priority darshan. Culturally, we’re obedient. Questioning authority is frowned upon. The older generation still carries the memory of scarcity and oppression. For them, “at least we can buy it now” feels like progress. Avoiding confrontation became a survival tool — live today, to fight another day.

This privatisation of survival has two costs.

It depoliticizes failure. If you can buy water, you stop demanding working pipelines. The urgency to fix the system evaporates.  It creates a two-tier nation. The poor stay stuck with the broken State. The rich and middle-class exit into another planet.

As Aiyar argues, this “private welfare state” is expensive and inefficient. The middle class burns income duplicating what taxes should already cover. And because the people with voice and resources opt out, the State never feels pressured to improve. Reform dies.

India’s most successful public-private partnership is between a failing State and a paying citizen. The State fails; you pay. The State fails again; you pay again.

It’s a downward spiral.

The State grows more inefficient and less accountable. Citizens aspiring basic civic dignity build private bubbles and try to keep up with rising costs — often by earning through unfair means. Imagine the future this builds: a State that rewards inefficiency and corruption.

Ignoring public failure and building private solutions may fix the immediate problem; but the public and private cost is far larger in the long run.

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Dated Rituals and our unquestioning acceptance of them:

The past few weeks have been unbearably hectic—marked by shock, grief, and strain. A string of medical emergencies involving a young relative and the death of an elderly family member have left deep emotional, physical, and financial wounds. As if that were not enough, the relentless pressure to observe age-old rituals became the final straw.

I write this in a daze, overwhelmed by the hundred instructions handed down by a dozen self-appointed experts. Some prescriptions are laughably absurd, yet the zeal with which kin and neighbors enforce them drains your will to resist. In a country that has failed to teach basic civic sense, it's surprising to see that these rituals are followed unquestioningly, without adaptation or change.

A generous definition of a conservative is someone who wants to preserve the good things of the past, and a liberal is someone who wants to discard the bad things based on scientific evidence and social relevance and retain the good ones. But the general perception created by the extreme elements in both groups is that a conservative is the one who wants to cling to everything of the past, and a liberal is the one who wants to destroy everything of the past. Torn between these two extreme views, we see families prefer the appearance of compliance over being labelled ‘liberal,’ simply because obedience has become the safer social currency.

Even so, my reasoning mind asks: What are these rituals? Why were they established? How have they evolved? And why have they endured?

By definition, a social ritual is a repeated, structured set of actions performed by individuals or groups according to established rules, carrying symbolic meaning within a community. 

Rituals reinforce group identity, mark transitions such as birth, marriage, and death, coordinate social life, express values and beliefs, and reduce uncertainty. Their features include repetition, prescribed sequence, recognised roles, symbolic elements (objects, words, gestures), and a shared understanding. Rituals permeate daily life—greetings, religious rites, civic ceremonies like graduations and inaugurations, manners and etiquette, and rites of passage such as weddings and funerals—each bearing the imprint of a community’s culture.

Funeral rituals, specifically, serve overlapping practical, psychological, social, and symbolic functions. 

They structure grief, enabling mourners to express sorrow, find closure, and begin recovery. They honour the deceased, affirm identity and social role, and bring family and community together for mutual support. Rituals mark the transition from life to whatever afterlife or memorial status a culture recognises, enact beliefs about death and continuity, and reassure the living about moral order. Practically, they ensure hygienic handling and disposal of the body, reduce infection risk, and manage material affairs like inheritance and burial sites. They also signal roles and obligations, transmit traditions, and reinforce norms; functions that foster cooperation and social stability, which anthropologists argue helped such practices persist across cultures.

Consider the funeral rituals practised in coastal Odisha over the roughly ten days following a death. 

At close inspection, these rites aim to ensure the timely and respectful disposal of remains in the presence of the community, safeguard family and public hygiene, and provide a structured path for mourning and eventual return to normal life. Extended family, clan, and community supply the physical, emotional, and financial support needed during this crisis.

Let's guess how these rituals would have evolved.

Knowledge in any society arises from observation and experience. People cannot be expected to perform scientific tests for every action, so when wise individuals observed reliable cause-and-effect patterns, they taught others to follow them for safety and benefit. Over time, such practices became social norms and rituals, formed with the community’s well-being in mind and shaped by geography, climate, endemic diseases, economic conditions, and the average person’s knowledge and emotional capacity at the time. 

Many such practices became part of regional religious customs and gained strong social protection. So entrenched are they that people follow them without reassessing their relevance. This rigidity invites abuse: the uneducated, socially marginalised, and economically poor not only suffer the loss of a loved one but also shoulder costly rituals that can shatter their finances.

Rituals vary by culture and are heavily influenced by climate and local diseases. We see clear differences across geographies and seasons, and subtle variations within regions; evidence that people and their customs change over time.

We have witnessed rapid change in the last four or five decades: advances in infrastructure, information technology, and telecommunications that created new opportunities, enabled social and economic mobility, and reduced regional imbalances. Remote villages now have roads, electricity, and running water—amenities once found only in cities. If we can adapt so quickly to technological and structural change, why do we not apply the same flexibility to inherited rituals and make them time and place-appropriate? It's often seen that individually, we may question and adapt, but collectively, we often surrender critical thought and choose compliance in the name of safety.

Many rituals, long woven into regional and religious life, persist unquestioned despite changing contexts. Their rigidity often burdens the most vulnerable—those who are uneducated, marginalised, or poor—who must bear not only grief but also costly, archaic practices that can devastate their finances. 

The time to review these ridiculous rituals has come, and individuals and powerful voices in society should bring about these reforms not only by talking about them but by practising them and setting examples for others to follow.

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