I have watched the clip a few times now, which is Agnimitra Paul, a minister in West Bengal, walking down a Kolkata street with her entourage on what the cameras called an eviction drive, and the milk that a homeless woman was boiling for her infant going onto the ground, and the minister’s explanation afterwards being about dirt and uncleanliness and encroachment, which is the part I cannot get past because it is a sentence about a drain that does not exist aimed at a woman who has no drain to use. The family was helped by the chief minister’s office the next day and the minister said she had made a mistake, and both of those things are true and neither of them is the part I keep turning over. Actually, the interesting thing is the direction the broom was pointed in before anybody was watching.

The question that followed is the one I want to take seriously, which is whether the investors will come, and it gets asked in every Indian city after every embarrassment, and the drive itself was presented as a cleanliness campaign, which in this country is almost always the same sentence as the one about investors not wanting to come to a dirty city, and I have started to think the question reveals more than the answer does because of who it assumes the state is working for. So I want to ask the question underneath it, which is who this investor actually is, and what he is given, and who pays for it.

I have sat in rooms where these things are discussed, with the charts and the memorandums of understanding signed at summits and the phrases about the investment climate and the ease of doing business, and the investor in those rooms is a very specific animal, which is somebody who arrives with a term sheet and a payback period and an exit, and who can move his money to another state or another country when the arithmetic stops working. That last part is the whole thing, because a company can leave while a citizen cannot, and the woman on the footpath has no relocation option and no term sheet, and she is the one who will still be standing on that street when the investor has gone.

What the investor gets is the part that almost never makes it into the press release, which is land at a fraction of what the local shopkeeper would pay for it and in some places land for free, stamp duty waived, a tax holiday running for years, electricity at a concessional tariff, capital subsidies, and a single window that actually opens for him, and on top of all of that the state builds the road and the water line and the substation and the compound wall that leads to his plot, so the state is the real investor in the project and the company is the one collecting the returns. In plain English; the road and the water and the wall are public money, and the plot’s earnings stay private. I watched a road get rebuilt near my own place twice in one year for no visible reason while a stretch in front of a small market has been broken for four, and I have stopped believing that the difference is engineering.

The risk sits in the same place, which is that the company carries a horizon of maybe seven to ten years and then decides again, and the state has already spent its capital by the time the decision gets remade, and if the plant packs up after the tax holiday the land usually stays with whoever holds the title, and the jobs vanish, and the subsidy has become a gift, and I have seen enough of these sheds lying empty behind locked gates to know how that movie ends. Its so sad to see. Meanwhile the man who pays for it has a horizon of a lifetime, since he cannot renegotiate his citizenship every decade, and he pays before he sees his money, which is income tax deducted at source, and then eighteen percent on almost everything he buys, and property tax on a flat whose lift does not work, and in return he gets a footpath he cannot walk on because the drain overflows, water he cannot drink without a filter he buys himself, and a school that fills up his evenings with tuition because the classroom failed, which is the trade I wrote about a few days ago when I was counting what the middle class pays for both ends of this country.

The land is the part that stings the most for me, because the state is sitting on the biggest land bank in the country and it acquires more every year from farmers who are paid whatever a collector decides is fair, and then that land goes out in parcels of a hundred acres on ninety nine year leases to companies which arrive from somewhere else, while the man who was born on the edge of that same land cannot get two thousand square feet to put up a workshop, and the graduate who wants to build something two streets away cannot get a room. The land, the hands and the demand are all there, and the only thing missing is permission, because unfortunately permission in this country is reserved for people who arrive with a letterhead, and I have to ask why the state will not trust the people who are already standing on it, and whether the honest answer is that it thinks we are incompetent.

That is the question the minister’s answer about dirt was really answering, and it is the question every small entrepreneur in this country is living inside, because the boy with a design studio goes to his bank with a folder full of work and the manager asks him for collateral and a fixed deposit, and his assets turn out to be his skills, which no bank in this country has learned to hold, and most times the guarantee scheme that exists for exactly this kind of loan never quite reaches him, and after the bank says no he spends the next two years walking between departments for a trade licence and a pollution clearance and a fire no objection and a power connection and a shop and establishment registration, each of which wants a different photocopy and a different holiday, and by the time he has all of it the market has moved on and his twenties are gone into side quests that had nothing to do with the thing he wanted to build. Nobody in that queue is asking for a hundred acres or ten years without tax, and what he wants is a bank that will look at his work and a window that opens.

I do not believe the incompetence story for a minute, because the evidence against it sits in plain sight, which is that Zoho built a global software company out of Tenkasi without taking a rupee of outside money and Zerodha became one of the largest brokers in the world without a single venture round, and a team of our own scientists put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars for less than it cost to make a Hollywood film about Mars, and the same state which doubts a boy from a small town will hand a hundred acres to a company that arrived with a slide deck and a promise. The part that worries me is the loop, because if your own people are never given the land and the capital and the two years of slack, then competence never gets a chance to show itself, and the absence of proof gets used as the argument for bringing in the next outsider, which then gets read as proof that we needed him.

What a graduate actually needs is so small that the size of the refusal becomes embarrassing, which is a bench and an instrument and a stipend and somebody who will not demand a result in the first year, because research is a business of failing slowly in public, and a country that spends around six tenths of one percent of its output on research while the countries it competes with spend two to four times that share has already declared how much it values the people who want to find things out. I am no expert so please take the ratios with a bag of salt. In Shenzhen a man with an idea can hold a working prototype within a week because the entire supply chain lives within an hour of him, and the same man here spends three weeks finding a board and another month finding somebody who can solder it, and then he goes to Singapore to raise his money and registers the company there, and we call that a success story when the money comes home as a remittance. The countries that caught up did it by hand-holding their own, since Japan’s ministry walked its firms into export markets and Korea’s government fed capital to its own companies and demanded results in return, and Taiwan built a single research institute that ended up creating the most important chip company in the world, and none of them sat around waiting for a foreign investor to arrive with a factory.

So the answer to whether the investors will come is probably yes, since the terms are generous enough that the money would be foolish to stay away, and the question nobody in that entourage was asking is whether the state will ever invest in its own people with the same enthusiasm. What I keep coming back to is the milk, because the woman on that footpath was not the problem, and what was missing was a drain and a kitchen and a tap and a toilet, and the minister who tipped her vessel over is the one whose department exists to build all of those things, and the same machinery that can hand a company ten years without tax could have built her a room with water for a fraction of one year of one incentive.

I do not know what the investors will do, and I have stopped believing that their arrival measures anything, because a country that has to be made attractive to strangers while it stays unlivable for its own people is describing its priorities in the plainest language available. The milk went onto the ground in front of a camera, and the question that followed was about investors, and I have started to think the two belong to the same story, which is a state that keeps asking who else might come when the only question worth asking is what its own people need in order to stay.

Tweet to me what you would build if the state gave you the land it gives away. I am @troysk704.