> SEZ dealing with SARR, but atleast its the state governments that face the headache and not the businesses

Can't underestimate the benefit of this difference, it's massive.

> It works until it doesn't

Yep, the failure modes are also of the ugly kind.

> Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.

I don't think we will replicate that model. I am not entirely sure what the model will be, since it's extremely unique. From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism, way more than I see among indians, income level and opportunity cost held equal.

I haven't yet seen an explanation for this, and the easy ones (e.g language, community) don't hold up to what I have seen.

I mean even most slums these days don't really have dirt poor people living in them. Dismantling it is not something the state can do and then just ignore the "powerless slum dweller" The people who used to live in the slums in the 70s decided to keep it that way (since they know the land is worth millions) and live in a standard apartment in a standard neighbourhood and treat the slum land as generational wealth. If you bulldozed it you will have money and lawyers coming at you. Not to mention they use tactics like building small temples and/or local hero memorials. So demolishing it becomes a news item on top of that. The new batch of city immigrants then stay in the actual slum asbestos houses, but after cities expanded most of them don't _really_ stay there. Some are also managed as a tourist attraction which leads to, let's say, artificial occupation. The problem with it is that it's forced, but that's another conversation.

It's the same with most urban issues - it only gets solved when the people (or more precisely, the swing voters) get rich enough to implicitly solve it. Electricity became better in TN only when majority of rural people became dependent on the mixer-grinder for making breakfast+lunch to take to work for husband and wife, all in the morning, enabling new behaviour. Until then they didn't really care if electricity went off. Note that city dwellers dont matter as much in elections, and less so back then. Flood management became much better since vardah was the first time majority of houses actually started having valuable things that get damaged! Before that, rural households simply kept their jewellery in the loft and moved to higher grounds. Only the urban dwellers actually suffered. Roads and storm-water mgmt became better only after most people started owning two-wheelers. It's still bad, but not as bad.

This is of course much slower, but there is also some surety to it. If there is a real incentive backing it, it ends up being executed better (by govt execution quality standards). And where I have seen it happen in front of my eyes in a rural town I frequent (now quite well-equipped I admit), it gets executed with a certain "fear of next elections" that I personally enjoy.

One interesting tidbit: of all things, internet connectivity is one such thing today. All rural households depend on it to such a degree that they would hanker more if "data is not there" versus even water not being there. Have observed people seeing water connections having issues, and temporarily reverting to the decade-ago norm of fetching it from a nearby pump with pots and mostly just... accepting it. But they go complain the same day when "data" goes out. To be fair, they use it for almost everything and not just leisure like we urban dwellers do, so it's understandable, but still.