India and the USA have long been friendly nations, with a pro-democratic stance and large economies fueling each other's progress. The USA offers a decent amount of aid while India offers a decent amount of highly skilled manpower in return. The USA likes to address this partnership as one between the longest (USA) and the largest (India) democracies in the world. The people of USA are treated with great respect and admiration for their optimism and productivity while the people of India are greatly admired for their intelligence yet humility. We are indeed two very closely knit nations in terms of world progress and prosperity. Yet, one thing stands in the way of all of this - Utility.
Everything in the US seems so well organized and everything in India is always hackish. The cabling of cities in India is a supreme example of such a hackish construction. This arises not due to a mindset but out of sheer necessity. An Indian city is generally first built, inhabited and eventually planned for, in that order. Thus, any new change is never an addition or a replacement but an 'extension' of whatever exists. In the USA however, things are first planned, and then built. Thus, it is easy to just include a new resource or utility in any existing framework or architecture. Things thus, seem efficient in both the USA and in India given their ways of execution of solutions to problems, in practice however, they aren't in either nations.
A wonderful case in point is the utility of electricity in the USA. One only needs to drive down some main road of a city or suburb and one would notice that the stores run their electrical and electronic appliances within the store for 24 hours everyday of the year. In India, entire cities would remain pitch dark at night, except for street-lighting. In the USA, there is no lighting on roads within residential areas, and the houses themselves are rarely well lit. In India, a house may or may not have clean running water, but it would certainly have the brightest of tube-lights around. As a matter of fact, stores in the US aren't open as long as their Indian counterparts every day. Exceptions to this are those rare retail giants who manage to run some of their stores 24*7 and there are rarely Indian stores who would remain 24*7. One could argue that the rubric to use in comparing the utility of electricity across both nations must be the amount of power consumed per individual. We Indians exercise restraint in utilizing electricity because India considers every resource (not just electricity) to be scarce and therefore expensive, given her population density. USA, on the other hand has always been able to afford to relax on such restraints. Such existing Indian restraints are ably augmented with frequent, consistent and incessant breakdowns in power supply across all parts of India.
Within a given duration of time, it is thus evident that if one were to consider the weighted average of power consumed per individual (weighted on the basis of his or her economic standing, which merely translates into a crude measure of affordability to spend money towards electricity), as a measure of efficiency of power consumption, India would trump the USA. We can extend such a thought beyond power to every other utility or resource being consumed by a nation - water, fuel, money (in which case it is expenditure), and so on. The trash cans in the USA are examples about how much wastage that as a population the USA accumulates as compared to India. The waste disposal system may be very well executed in the USA as opposed to India, but the sheer amount of wastage generated per individual is equivalent to that in India, and given the respective populations of the two nations, this is a sorry case. In India for instance, although waste is rarely segregated based on its type, there is no wastage of waste :-). To extend that in terms of the US habits, it means to say that one doesn't use disposable paper cups or paper plates to have a snack or drink, rather they use utensils which can be re-used over and over again.
Such habits are disastrous in terms of the amount of other resources which are indirectly wasted on a large scale. Using paper towels for almost anything, wood for houses etc could have been in cases when a population was not sure of its existence on a long-term standing, in other words - it was a nomadic population. When there are stones which are abundant in supply as opposed to depleting forests, why not use stones to construct houses, and metal to use for many other utilities ?
The gradual addiction of a population to sub-optimal practices in resource utilization can only spell doom. The constant habituation of a population to disregard certain so-called best practices for hackish yet smart usage practices would always remain efficient, thrifty and optimal from a global perspective of resource utilization. Let the largest and the longest democracies of the world together exemplify the most sensible practices of resource utilization for the rest of our planet to adopt. The whole world can then strive to achieve feasible yet sustainable progress for all mankind to follow and work upon.
