I don’t know how it is in never-colonized countries, but here, local bodies don’t get much by way of taxes and infrastructure spending is by state or national government since all income and business taxes go to them ala colonial administration. Locals don’t have leverage over infrastructure projects, and local body politicians have no pressure from locals over their handling of non-infrastructure funds.

All good points. I mentioned their lakhs of employees, because that bill keeps rising and probably faster than income. It is the public sector - they will waste money on unnecessary things - but they need to keep up with the personnel bill additionally. That combination means they need to generate money from somewhere.

I think government funding patterns have changed, and ministries have been looking to generate funds rather than be funded by the exchequer. Think BSNL, NHAI. So too IR?

That’s what you meant? Got it. Absolutely, messing with aesthetic durable structures is irresponsible on IR’s part.

What are you going on about!

haha. The Congress is not left-wing? The party that decreed we were a “socialist,” secular republic? Is the current government doing anything that is not a continuation of what previous ones were doing?

We happen to have a public-sector-only rail system, with low ticket prices on most trains. I don’t know how much it costs to keep the majority of routes, subsidized as they are. Maybe the vanity projects with high-ticket prices will help with that. I believe the bigger expenditure perennially has been on personnel, as IR has lakhs of employees. That can’t be wished away.

The metro rail projects are separate entities, I guess IR only provides oversight.

Rail is only about a century old. I didn’t know we had historic stations. More like Mughal-era and British-era holdovers.

Prefixing left- this and right- that to anything detracts from focusing on it.

You’d be even more shocked that left-wing politicos, who were in power thrice as long, were equally bad and created the mess that has to be managed.

The votes on the other 2 points will tell whether your mentioning Singapore was “engagement” to begin with.

Oh, and. Now I don’t need a separate bookmarks app, a separate notes app, a separate todo list app, syncing mechanisms for them, or a mechanism to search through all of them.

I never liked the fact there is a contacts app which other apps can tap into.

I have started using an org-mode file with entries that have tel: or callto: properties. I lose vCard exportability, but I can use the file as-is instead.

* Open-source

Yes

* Android, Web, and (if necessary) Linux and Windows clients

Emacs on larger devices, Orgzly on Android

* Stores contact info locally (i.e. self-hosted)

Yes

* Stores contact info securely (encrypted)

Unencrypted, but if you don’t allow apps other than syncing apps the permission to access all files, it may not matter as much

* Can store in a cloud location (e.g. Sync, Dropbox)

I just have Syncthing set up to sync those files too

Where do you think I live! I wrote about lived experience, maybe you didn’t notice that OP just made a blanket statement that neither matched my experience nor is itself experience.

This sounds like armchair moaning. How would you have set up infrastructure ahead of time to have handled that situation?

Respond with an example.

Are there large regions with good population density and existing land use that have good roads designed around those existing holdings, unlike what is done in UP, India?

Upvote if you agree.

And you think that elevated road not useful to the layman taking up space is OK? And the problem is the simple design of the road below, which people use uneventfully everyday with common sense at Indian speeds?

Upvote if you agree.

So, you think that, even when roads and transport policies are co-designed on a clean slate like in Singapore, transport policies wouldn’t have influenced road design? When even something as simple as a bus lane has been known to work?

Some guy brings up Singapore, I talk about Singapore, and the guy says it is not on topic.

Apparently, road design has nothing to do with whether public transport is involved or not and in what form.

That’s the Internet.

To be fair, buses don’t solve last-mile situations like this one, unless you expect the route to become walkable by reduction in car numbers. Even then, I wouldn’t begrudge the busy housewife avoiding a long walk with a kid in tow.