What Glaeser says about Indian cities

Edward Glaeser went to India, and wrote about basic services! He makes

a moderate, and only somewhat facetious, libertarian progressive proposal. Unless a government manages to provide clean water to its poorest citizens, it should refrain from any new barrier to international trade, complex nationalization scheme or draconian zoning laws.

Throughout, he makes a bunch of references to western urban planning a century or two ago, which is a no-no in my book, but I like the link he makes here and there between basic service provision, and larger transformations of urbanisation and governance. I'm finding this particularly hard to come by here, with people talking about decentralisation and public services like they're happening in different countries. All the discussions about 'governance in post-conflict DRC' would be much more interesting to me if they talked less about political parties, and more about clean drinking water.