behaviour is the last link in a chain the state is supposed to build

The drain at the end of our lane overflowed again last week, and the neighbourhood WhatsApp group did what such groups do, which was blame the neighbours for throwing garbage into it. I have been that uncle in the group chat more than once, so I am not writing this from a high horse. But the bin had not been lifted in nine days, the drain had not been desilted since the last election, and the sewage line behind it was still waiting for a tender. The wrapper was the last mile of a failure that started much further upstream. That is the thing about blaming people, because it is always accurate at the last mile and almost always wrong about the cause, and we do it everywhere. Streets are filthy because citizens have no civic sense, companies do not spend on research because businessmen are short sighted, pedestrians die because drivers are reckless. Then comes the refrain of what can the government do, which is a strange question to ask in a country where the government is the only one with a JCB.

I am not an urban planner and I have never run a municipality, so if I flatten the details, help me correct them. But the older I get, the more I think behaviour is the wrong unit of analysis. A person does not make decisions in a vacuum, and the vacuum is full of incentives and infrastructure and rules and enforcement and the expectations of everyone around them, and almost all of that is shaped by the state. The dirty street and the dead pedestrian are the visible end of a system that was designed badly or not designed at all. A modern economy is an organised system, and the spontaneous pile of virtuous citizens and clever firms is mostly what the organising leaves behind. Somebody has to do the organising, and the job of a capable state is to arrange things so that a million private decisions add up to something useful. When they do not add up, we go looking for a villain at the bottom of the chain, because the villain at the top is harder to see and better dressed.

China is the example I keep coming back to, and I think most people read it backwards. Take Shanghai’s waste. Sorting became mandatory in July 2019, and by the city’s own count the share of residential communities meeting the standard went from about 15% to about 90% within a year. It is tempting to read that as a disciplined people finally behaving, until you look at what the city built around them. It upgraded some 21,000 sorting stations, set up around 12,000 recycling points and a collection and transport chain to match, and only then expected a household to sort a banana peel from a plastic bottle. There were fines too, about 3,400 in the first five months, and monitors and cameras at the collection points, so this was not gentle. But the rules had something to be complied with. Shanghai had tried the same thing in 600 communities around 2000, and it fizzled for lack of supervision. The residents did not acquire civic virtue between 2000 and 2019. The system changed. No country on earth has discovered a population with an unusually large supply of civic virtue. The institutions produce the behaviour, repeated behaviour becomes an expectation, and the expectation is what visitors eventually call culture.

We ran the Indian version of that experiment with Swachh Bharat, and we built toilets at a scale that deserves respect, something like ten crore of them in five years. Then we asked the citizen to complete a chain that starts with water and maintenance and sewage treatment and waste collection and ends with a municipal truck that actually arrives. A toilet without water is a shed. The mission did well on the counting sheet and struggled on the ground because the bottom of the chain was never built. China launched its own toilet revolution in 2015 and officials put rural sanitary toilet coverage at about 77% this year, and the researchers studying it point to operation and financing and management as the weak joints, which is the same chain I am describing. The countries that cleaned up fast, China and South Korea among them, treated sanitation as a public health and infrastructure problem first and asked the individual to do their part second.

India has its own proof that this is about systems and not about Indians. Indore was ranked 149th in a cleanliness survey in 2014 and has been the cleanest city in the country every year since 2017, eight years running as of the 2024-25 survey. Nothing happened to the citizens of Indore. The municipal corporation took away the bins, started door-to-door collection that reached every household by the end of 2016, and made segregation at source the next link in the chain. The same is true of how people move. China did not discover a population with a natural love of trains. It opened its first proper high-speed line, Beijing to Tianjin, in 2008, and at the end of 2025 it had more than 50,000 km of high-speed rail reaching 97% of cities with over half a million people, plus about 13,000 km of urban rail across 58 cities. Both figures are more than the rest of the world has. Nobody was lectured into taking the train. The train was built, and the behaviour followed the design. Housing is where China teaches the other half of the lesson, and an honest version of this argument has to include it. The state that built the rail network also presided over a property sector that ran on presales and borrowed money, and that sector has been in a slump since 2021. Evergrande is in liquidation and millions of half-built homes sit derelict. Capable is not the same as wise, and the outcome follows the design in both directions. Our own housing story is the unbuilt kind, with land that is hard to assemble and approvals that take years and supply that cannot keep up, which is why property costs a fortune and the builders are tied up in approvals. The roads are where the blame gets loudest and the evidence is clearest. We say Indian drivers are undisciplined and leave it there, while Sweden decided in 1997 that humans everywhere make mistakes and the transport system should be designed so that a mistake does not become a funeral, which is the whole idea behind Vision Zero. They rebuilt roads, managed speeds, protected pedestrians and tightened vehicle standards and licensing and enforcement, and they now lose roughly two hundred people a year in a country of about ten million. We lose about 1.7 lakh a year. The difference sits in a system that assumes the hands will shake.

In plain English, the road is a system before it is a behaviour, and the driver is the last component in that system. Standards are the invisible version of the same argument. We rely on them for food and medicines and buildings and cars and accounting and banks, and none of us can personally verify any of it. The state is what makes a stranger’s promise worth something, which is why a country with weak enforcement pays for it in every transaction, and the trust infrastructure is as real as the road even though nobody photographs it. Research and development is where the blame gets intellectual. We say Indian businessmen are short sighted about R&D, and R&D is expensive and uncertain and slow to pay off, and the knowledge spills over to competitors, and researchers are scarce, and the universities are not connected to industry, and an established technology can often be bought more cheaply than a new one can be developed. Telling a company to be more innovative does nothing to any of those incentives. The United States gets celebrated for private innovation, while the internet and the GPS and the semiconductors came out of decades of public money for basic science and defence research and universities and procurement. The private sector commercialised what the public sector had already paid to discover. Japan after the Meiji Restoration worked out that a country starting far behind cannot wait for private capital and entrepreneurial culture to catch up, so it imported technology and built infrastructure and technical education and institutions that could absorb foreign knowledge. After the war the government coordinated technology and finance and standards and exports while the companies competed ferociously in the global market, and South Korea did the same with Samsung and Hyundai. The state built the infrastructure, expanded technical education, directed finance and linked the whole thing to exports, which is a lot more than exhortation, and the bureaucracy had to be close enough to business to understand the problem and autonomous enough to withdraw support from a failure. China ran the largest version of it. Its R&D spending reached 3.93 trillion yuan in 2025, about 2.8% of GDP, which put it above the OECD average for the first time, and more than three quarters of that was spent by enterprises. That tells me Chinese businessmen are not more far-sighted than ours so much as they operate inside a system that makes the long bet worth taking. With electric vehicles the state supported battery technology and charging infrastructure and procurement and manufacturing while local governments competed for the investment. By 2025 China had about 4.7 million public charging points, more than half of its new cars sold were electric or hybrid, and it accounted for more than half of all electric cars sold in the world.

None of this makes China a template. Shanghai’s compliance came with fines and cameras and volunteers watching the bins, the headline numbers are the city’s own, and a state that can lay 50,000 km of rail can also leave millions of homes unfinished. I am borrowing one lesson, that outcomes follow design, and not the whole package. What I want for India is that capacity with accountability attached, which is why the question I care about is who was supposed to desilt the drain. So when something goes wrong in this country and stays wrong, the useful move is to look up the chain, because the neta and the babu who run the system are the ones who decide whether the drain gets desilted and the standard gets enforced and the university gets funded. Blaming the man who threw the wrapper gives a free pass to the people who were supposed to build the bin, and that should annoy us more than the wrapper. And I say this as somebody who has thrown the wrapper, and blamed the neighbour, and voted for the same set of people and then complained about the government at dinner. So the first duty I can name, before I fix my own behaviour, is to ask who was supposed to desilt the drain, which tender is still pending and why the contract went to somebody’s cousin, because that is the question the system is designed to make you forget.

Send me the civic failure your group chat blamed on the neighbours, I am @troysk704.