Conversations with The “Public Pessimist”: Tales from the World’s highest post office and other curious places

(Introducing a Series of Indefinite Length)

The Public Pessimist: A person who believes that the public sector sucks all our money into a black hole of corruption and inefficiency and is incapable of delivering even the most rudimentary of services.

If you take the road out of Kaza towards Kibber, but then remember to turn right and climb for a bit (where there is a fork in the road stick to the right), in about 14 Kms (and 3Km short of Komik) you will get to Hikkim, a beautiful village overlooking the river far below. But dwell not on its beauty and turn instead to the post office, which at 4,400m or 14,500 feet, is the world’s highest continuously operational post office.

If you have been conditioned to believe that India has lots of problems with public employees showing up for work, fear not. Stepping inside, you will find the postman diligently waiting for your mail. Buy a postcard and stamps, post yourself (don’t forget your friends and family) a letter and perhaps by the time you get back down to wherever you call home, it will be waiting for you (and yes, I can confirm that the letters—even those posted to the U.S. and Spain—have arrived).

The reason I bring up Hikkim’s post office is this: Apart from our little motley crowd, the people of Komik (population 130 in 2011) and Hikkim (population 212 in 2011) are not crowding that post office. Especially in winter, with the thick snow on the ground, my guess would be that our postman is idle most of the time. The post office serves mostly outsiders like ourselves, posting a letter from the world’s highest post office in the relative warmth of the summer months.

And you could think: Isn’t that just the biggest waste of public money?

But if you missed that right turn just beyond Kaza and landed up in Kibber? In that case, fear not. Walk towards the giant Buddha and look South-East to see the homes of Tashigang. With 52 registered voters, Tashigang, at 15,250 feet is the world’s highest polling station. In case you want to know how they do it, the hardy 29 polling officers of Spiti set up a booth in the village, bring up the Electronic Voting Machine and employ satellite phones and “runners” to relay the polling data to HQ.

The reason I bring up Tashigang’s polling booth is this: With just 52 voters, the villagers of Tashigang will never make a difference to the election results in Lahaul and Spiti, the voting constituency that the villagers belong to.

And couldn’t you also think: Isn’t that just the biggest waste of public money?

Which brings us to what this series is about.

Just as the extension of the franchise to every single citizen of the country in 1947 formed a sacred covenant between our people and our government, the idea that every citizen of our country had the positive right to a set of services was one of the most powerful and galvanizing forces towards justice and equality in the country. Of course, what these services should be has always been contested and, of course we have never carried through and systematically fallen far short of the ideals that we set ourselves. But till the early 2000s, at least the arc of history was bending in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the commitment and self-belief that we held when it came to delivering services to every citizen through the 1960s and 1970s started to be questioned in the 1980s and fray around the 1990s. It came under serious attack in the early 2000s and is now in full-scale retreat. Partly because it is argued that certain populations do not deserve those services (more politely, the cost of those services is too high) and partly because we now believe that the hard work of building up the state to provide these services can instead be circumvented by simply handing them over to the private sector.

How else should we think of Punjab, Pakistan thinking seriously of handing over a third of its schools to the private sector? Or of India continuing to believe that health services can be delivered to the poor through complicated U.S.-like voucher systems?

This new series, called “Conversations with The Public Pessimist” argues that, at best, these proposals constitute a fundamental redesign of the post-colonial social contract and at worst, they are a grave mistake. In either case, these are not decisions that should be taken by fiat. They deserve a broader democratic debate based on the underlying theoretical and empirical arguments, and it is this debate that the series contributes to.

My (several) first posts are on education. I then move to health before returning to the theoretical debates around how society should determine whether someone receives a subsidy. In some sense, this follows a traditional demarcation of the problem into a question of “who should provide a service once it has been funded,” and “should it be funded in the first place.”

As always, I look forward to your comments and thoughts as I work through this.

And, as always, this and subsequent posts have benefitted from comments by several people, including Veena and Ranen Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Alec Brockell and James Habyarimana among others.