By Andy Mukherjee

Bloomberg News - The World Bank calls it India's "Build-Neglect-Rebuild" model. It's a malaise that plagues the delivery of transportation, electricity, water and most other services that the Indian government provides -- or, more appropriately, attempts to provide -- to its citizens.

Typically, the charges that users pay for a service cover only a fraction of the operational and maintenance costs.

A perverse sense of social justice ensures that most of the shortfall faced by state-owned utilities -- including the wages of their surplus manpower -- is recouped from taxpayers.

Part of the bargain is that no one pays for the replacement of aging, badly maintained assets, such as the 100-year-old rain sewers of Mumbai. Only when the neglect becomes unbearable for users do the authorities mount a desperate attempt to rebuild the service -- with no effort to change the conditions responsible for its decline.

Fixing this culture of neglect would not only improve the quality of government services in India, it would also bring the country much --needed private investments in infrastructure -- roads, ports, bridges, highways and urban services.

This is one of the crucial findings of a recent World Bank study, titled "India: Inclusive Growth and Service Delivery."

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Posted by rjorr at August 4, 2006 9:01 AM