I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. They started off far down the hole when they became a nation after securing their freedom from colonization. They have progressed in many ways, including some of the best schools in the world (IIT), some of the best entrepreneurs and engineers, and some the most advanced technologies (nuclear weapons, modern military, space program). But there is large disparity between rich and poor, partly due to technology enriching some few. Kind of similar to what is happening here in the US, except that the US has/had a much large middle class.
> I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program.
Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.
I think it's a symptom of a different bigger problem: that vestiges of the caste systems once pervasive in India (and indeed much of the world) for the last several millennia are still very present. The belief that "those darn workers exist to do manual labor, so we should come to expect that they'll always want to do manual labor and - therefore - we should provide such opportunities" is a rather clear manifestation of that vestige.
In this context, I don't think such a jobs program is in any way, shape, or form intended with genuine altruism. Perhaps that's what India as a whole has convinced itself of in order to rationalize its societal behavior, but it's not something that should fool anyone with the slightest understanding of south-central Asian history.
Basically, I'd argue that the reluctance to automate away manual labor stems not from a desire to empower laborers, but rather to keep them subjugated and prevent them from climbing their way into any semblance of a middle class.
I am an Indian, and have always lived in India. And, in several parts of India too!
The problem of caste is certainly visible in multiple aspects of Indian life. However, what you say above is no longer true, even at the level of most villages (where the caste systems work stronger).
The issues of automating jobs and the resulting unemployment in a country like India, are both deeper and broader than your characterization of it.
You may very well be right; I am looking at this from thousands of miles away, after all! And I'm sure everyone here would enjoy hearing your perspective on it, seeing as much of Hacker News (I'd reckon) is in a similar boat.
That said, it should be understandable why I'd take your comment with a skeptical grain of salt. Slave-owners in the Southern United States (something which I'm in much closer proximity to, though perhaps not temporally) typically had a lot of justifications for owning slaves, ranging from "We're helping them establish a modern culture!" to "We're introducing them to God and Jesus!" to "They like to work; they were bred for it!" to "We treat them pretty well, actually!" (this was a blatant lie in many cases, mind you) to "What else would they do if we were to not give them work to do?". Similar justifications persisted throughout the days of the Jim Crow laws and their ilk; even after slavery had been abolished once and for all, the now-free black populace was - in the South - rarely (if ever) encouraged to deviate from manual agrarian labor, since that was popularly believed to be their "place". The Civil War was indeed a pretty powerful wake-up call to the ways where the North's automated/streamlined manufacturing and agriculture - using machines instead of men - mopped the metaphorical floor with Southern slave-driven manual labor, but it took a long time for the South to fully realize that.
Today, the United States is still dealing with high unemployment rates of various minorities - including blacks. This is likely caused by automation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. It sucks for those who don't have jobs in the short term, but - ultimately - it'll encourage those who were previously stuck with factory and farm jobs at best to seek educational financial assistance (which is available for low-income households) and work their way into better careers. I'll take that - along with the bit of ultimately-temporary unemployment caused by it - over blacks and Hispanics (among other minorities; Asian immigrants were victims of this as well, but a large-enough portion of the Asian-American population eventually managed to achieve white-collar jobs and top-tier academic performance that the public view has shifted in the other direction entirely) being treated as if manual labor is the only thing they're good for.
You can't blame me for seeing the parallels here. If India is willing to burn money on giving people menial busy-work for the sake of "employment", it should be more willing to instead burn money on giving those people subsidized education and placement into more modernized roles (like operating or maintaining the machines which replaced their old jobs, for example). The reluctance to do so indicates - to me at least, as someone who can relate his own experiences to this - a cultural or societal unwillingness to allow them to do so; the reasons for not doing so are certainly not ones grounded in rationality or economic common sense, which thus implies a more emotional line of thought.
"their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good"
And what is economically good for India? You say that as if you have the correct answer. You're also assuming that the people there voted for the system that they have, and due to their ignorance, they ended up with a system that is causing their problems. I doubt that the present state of India can be attributed to something so simple.
