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Developments:
Singapore: There is rubbish on the streets. I want my money back. After three months in India you become a stickler for clean streets...
Still, it's not surprising. I haven't seen a policeman yet, let alone anyone being arrested for environment defilement. Call yourself a police state...
It's cleaner than anywhere else I've been though, so either the fear of God has been injected into Singapore's citizens by its invisible police force, or they have an extremely strong sense of civic pride and responsibility.
The government seems to do its bit too. On the metro, for example, for every plastic ticket you buy you pay a deposit of one Singapore dollar, which is given back when you return the ticket at the end of the journey. The result: no metro tickets lying around in the gutters and no decimated forests.
No expense is spared in making life as easy as possible. Footbridges have escalators at both ends; orchids grow in metro stations; you can walk for miles in air-conditioned tunnels and malls without once having to step out into the heat and humidity; and public toilets flush themselves. The pavements, roads and many green spaces, too, are in brutally slick condition, and public transport is a delight. Singaporeans, therefore, are left to get on with the serious business of making money.
Of course, like most of this web log, these are necessarily only impressions (and often trite ones at that) formed in a couple of days. The many Indians who work here do not appear to enjoy anything like the wealth the Singaporean Chinese do (although they are much better off than most of their compatriots on the other side of the Indian Ocean), and no doubt many of the stories about the quashing of dissent are true (the local Straits Times newspaper is stunningly anodyne when discussing domestic matters).
But it's still an impressive feat to do what Singapore has done - create a clean, modern, wealthy and vibrant city in a continent where only the latter description usually applies - in the space of just 50 years. Recently named Asia's most globalised economy by Foreign Policy magazine, for a small country with no natural resources but its people, the combination of openness and education doesn't seem to have done it any harm at all.
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