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Comment by astatine | Hacker News Reader

I thought I was cynical about the city, but your comment leaves my dull-grey feeling positively bright and sunny. Most people in the city, and indeed across the country or the world for that matter, want a decent life for themselves. At least in Bangalore, government jobs are not the best option for that. Economics dictates that one needs to go very high up in the government service to out-earn a regular, private-sector job. Since most people realize they will not make it that far, it is far easy to get a better life here and now by taking a private sector job - or even be a new-gen gig worker. I do not actually see everyone wanting themselves - or their kids - to just become corrupt babus.

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I would like this to put statistically. Out of 40 students in my class (1990s), no one aspired to be an IAS or IPS. There could be two reasons. (1) They didn't want to be corrupt, OR (2) They might be thinking it is beyond their intellectual reach.

Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.

I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.

Unfortunately, but Kamaal is right.

It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.

It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.

Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.

Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.

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