worth reading The One-Stoplight Metropolis

Is India really the next big thing in golf development, as growing numbers of commentators believe, or is it just another flash in the pan?

Heck, I don't know. I'm not in the prediction business. But before you put all your design, development, or construction eggs in India's basket, take a minute to digest another view of India, courtesy of Tom Friedman of the New York Times:

Driving to the covered bazaar in the exotic western Indian town of Jodhpur last week, our Indian guide stopped to point out a modern landmark.

“Do you see that stoplight?” he asked, pointing to a standard green-yellow-red stoplight in the busy intersection. “It’s the only stoplight in Jodhpur. There are 1.2 million people living here.”

The more you travel around India, the more you notice just how lightly the hand of government rests on this country. Somehow, it all sort of works. The traffic does move, but, for the first time in all my years visiting India, I’ve started to wonder whether India’s “good enough” approach to government will really be good enough much longer. Huge corruption scandals have stripped the government of billions of dollars of needed resources, and, as much as I’m impressed by the innovative prowess of India’s young technologists, without a government to enable them with the roads, ports, bandwidth, electricity, airports, and smart regulations they need to thrive, they will never realize their full potential.

This isn’t just a theoretical matter. The air in India’s biggest cities is unhealthy. You rarely see a body of water here -- a river, lake, or pond -- that is not polluted. The sheer crush of people -- India will soon have more than China -- on an unprotected environment really seems to be taking its toll. Without better governance, how will India avoid becoming an ecological disaster area in 10 years?

Eventually the law of large numbers -- 1.2 billion people -- just starts to devour every minimalist step forward that India makes. India doesn’t need to become China, and isn’t going to. But it still needs to prove that its democracy can make and implement big decisions with the same focus, authority and stick-to-it-iveness as China’s autocracy. . . .