Manu

Bengaluru Blurtchaser

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

The economic and demographic effects of corruption.

Cost of land in our urban areas is far higher than what our GDP per capita would dictate. The ratio of land value to per capita GDP is probably higher in India than anywhere else. As an example, land prices in Chennai or Bengaluru rival that of cities like New York which has a vastly higher per capita GDP.

The key reason?

First, vast sums of political corruption money is parked in real estate. This raises real estate prices and high real estate prices affect everything downstream.

Second, corruption in building approvals and the like - the famous DTCP - raises construction costs, on top of already higher real estate costs.

Third, corruption in private school regulatory compliance enforcement raises school fees.

Fourth, corruption in private hospital regulatory compliance enforcement raises health care costs.

Fifth, household goods need sales outlets and those pay higher rents due to high real estate prices and construction costs.

So housing, education, healthcare and household goods - all of these now cost higher.

As a direct consequence, the economic burden on the average person gets worse. Young people, facing all these costs, postpone marriage, and postpone children or have fewer children.

That directly affects our demographics.

While this issue exists in many parts of India, Tamil Nadu, being the most urbanized of the bigger states, is particularly hit hard.

So corruption is becoming an existential threat to our society.

If you worry about the super-low birth rate in Tamil Nadu, way below replacement, understand that corruption raising our cost of living is one of the major causes, not the only cause, but a big one in our context.

[SportsCenter @SportsCenter]

Edward Norton talking to himself at the USA-Türkiye game 😅

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Crazy take from Claude

[Sanjay R Murty @srm2k15]

While the SC called for a dedicated law to protect pedestrians, Karnataka has been sitting on its draft Active Mobility Bill for years.

Highlights of the bill's provisions and experts' take 👇

[Manu @manukrishna]

@ashwinmahesh What's the way out? I worry that this might be a hot potato issue that noone wants to handle.

[Manu @manukrishna]

@VishwaKranthi97 @DKShivakumar @GBA_office @GBAChiefComm @ICCCBengaluru @INCKarnataka @CMofKarnataka Saw this on the way back from airport today. Starts at Mekhri Circle and goes all the way until Corporation Circle. Shameless and utterly ugly.

[Aarthi Iyengar @ThatsAarthi]

Thank you. This is inner ring road, coming from Indiranagar to Koramangala on a weekday. Street hawkers have taken up the side lane + the pavement on both sides of ring road. This not only obstructs the pavement, but also causes so much traffic. As if the road works and flyover construction isn't causing enough chaos, we have guys selling t shirts and omelettes on the ring road? What is stopping them from setting up a stall outside safina plaza or outside empire to sell their stuff? And why is @BlrCityPolice @blrcitytraffic allowing this?

[Manu @manukrishna]

Another day, another BWSSB deathtrap. Walking my kid to school just 500m away from home. That's too much by our footpath standards. Accident waiting to happen. (Near DG signal, Padmanabhanagar)

@ChristinMP_ @ashwinmahesh @TVMohandasPai @GBAChiefComm @bwssbchairman @GBA_office

[Manu @manukrishna]

Hahahaha

[Ashish Kumar @BaapofOption]

Ravi Gupta at its best. That isn't a joke. Thats the reality 😭

[Manu @manukrishna]

@WF_Watcher @NammaBengaluroo @ChristinMP_ Cops on the ground the need of the hour. Single biggest determinant of compliance.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

I used to love a web tool called StumbleUpon. Added a button to your browser that would take you to random blogs and websites. Found so much fascinating stuff that way, and it was the antithesis of today’s winner-take-most centralised web.

[Josh @joshpearson180]

Paddy Power are the king of adverts and I won’t be told any different

[Ramesh Srivats @rameshsrivats]

Okay GBA, I accept the #1KmChallenge. I'll walk 1 kilometer.
Now a #1KmChallenge for you: Build 1 kilometer of footpath somewhere.

[Manu @manukrishna]

In Ooty stuck behind a massive car pileup as I type this. Insane that the only type of traffic management is redirection. Zero signs of expansion.

[Ritesh Banglani @banglani]

Continuing the theme from yesterday, it baffles me that our instinct to solve every overcrowding problem is to curtail demand rather than build capacity.

China has built 2000 km of railway in Tibet, of which 1000 km is above an unbelievable 13,000 feet (Joshimath is at less than half that altitude). Yet we are litigating a daily quota on tourists instead of demanding an expansion of transport infrastructure.

Instead of blaming the tourists for wanting to escape the intense heat of the Indian plains, we should be asking why our vast Himalaya cannot accommodate 10x the number of visitors than it does today.

[Ajay Rotti @ajayrotti]

I am not kidding one bit when I say this - BJPs best chance of winning and forming a Govt in Karnataka in 2028 is by projecting @hd_kumaraswamy as the CM face. There is not a single leader in BJP Karnataka who can be projected.

[Manu @manukrishna]

@comm_blr_south Do something about the blackspot that is permanently there also.

[Manu @manukrishna]

Hard agree

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

Y'all—this optimization stuff can make you fragile.

If you are in recovery then yes, of course, a few glasses of wine will mess up your week (or worse). If you get drunk then yes, I could see it messing up a day or two.

But if going out to dinner and having a few glasses of wine throws you for this much of a loop then perhaps you've actually just become fragile?

I mean how would Steven manage having a newborn, or really any age kid? Or just the general uncertainty and messiness of life?

In my new book I tell the story of golfer JJ Spaun, who was up all night with his vomiting toddler. His Whoop sleep score would have been zero. The next morning, he went out and won the U.S. Open.

Actual excellence (not the elaborate, performative internet variety) demands resilience. It controls the controllables, no doubt. But it also ensures you don't optimize yourself into fragility, which is an increasingly common trap and performance killer. https://t.co/DXJIiW7M9z

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it.

Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak.

Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people."

1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support.

2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade.

3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility.

4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing.

India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

[Naveen Menezes @naveenmzs]

One corporation became five, yet on the ground, the reality still looks exactly the same.

Location: ORR in Kalyan Nagar

@HennurBlr

[Manu @manukrishna]

Hahaha

[Ryanair @Ryanair]

does he not have teammates?