Nearly 15 years ago, my father persuaded the administration to install solar streetlights along the winding footpaths leading to our village. My grandfather was delighted. For him, the lights meant something more than electricity. They meant progress finally finding its way to a place that maps often forgot.
Some village elders, however, seemed oddly unenthusiastic. My father mistook their indifference for the familiar suspicion that greets every new idea in rural India. “They’ll come around,” he said. They did. Within a week. Not to admire the lights, but to dismantle them.
The solar panels disappeared first. Then the batteries. Only the poles remained, standing like abandoned sentries against the mountain sky. It was my first lesson in development. Building public infrastructure is difficult. Building a public that believes it deserves that infrastructure is harder.
This week, an Indian Express report, based on RTI queries and responses, revealed that passengers stole 1.27 crore bedsheets, towels, blankets and pillows from Indian Railways’ AC coaches in just four years. The loss exceeded Rs 104 crore. The irony is almost unbearable. Those entrusted with cleaning and maintaining the coaches often bear the financial penalty for what passengers quietly carry home.
The story made headlines because the number is staggering. It should have made headlines because it is utterly unsurprising.
When public means nobody’s
Every Indian has witnessed some version of this story.
A newly installed park bench disappears. A brass tap vanishes from a public toilet. Roadside railings are sold as scrap. Electrical cables are stripped overnight. Dustbins disappear from parks. Hotel towels become souvenirs. Office stationery finds its way home. Somewhere, someone proudly narrates how they “managed” to bring back a railway blanket as though it were evidence of cleverness rather than confession.
The instinctive explanation is poverty. But that argument collapses under scrutiny. The passenger travelling in an air-conditioned coach is rarely stealing because they cannot afford a bedsheet. The executive pocketing office supplies is not acting out of deprivation. Hunger explains survival. It does not explain entitlement.
The real explanation lies elsewhere. We have created two moral universes. In one, private property is sacred. Touch my car, my phone or my home without permission, and it is theft.
In the other, public property is strangely ownerless. A railway towel does not belong to a fellow citizen. It belongs to “the government” — an abstract, faceless entity imagined to possess infinite resources and infinite patience. The moral weight of theft evaporates because the victim has no face.
Yet every railway towel belongs to someone. To the taxpayer who paid for it. To the child whose school loses funding when public money is diverted to replace what should never have been stolen. To the commuter who eventually receives poorer services because amenities become liabilities. The tragedy, then, is not merely financial. It is moral.
The cost of everyday dishonesty
Political scientists often describe trust as the invisible infrastructure upon which prosperous societies are built. Roads, bridges and railways can be constructed with money. Trust cannot.
It is built slowly through everyday acts of restraint — the decision not to litter because the street belongs to everyone; not to vandalise because the park is ours; not to steal because public property is simply private property shared on a larger scale.
India has invested trillions in physical infrastructure over the past decade. Expressways now cut through mountains. Airports have multiplied. Railway stations are being transformed. Smart cities are rising. Yet infrastructure can modernise a landscape only if civic culture modernises alongside it. Otherwise, every new amenity begins its life with an expiry date.
There is another cost that balance sheets cannot capture. Every missing towel teaches institutions to trust citizens a little less. Every stolen fitting persuades bureaucrats to install cheaper alternatives. Every act of petty dishonesty invites another layer of surveillance, another security guard, another locked gate, another form, another refundable deposit. Slowly, inconvenience becomes governance.
This is how societies decline; not dramatically, but incrementally.
A crisis of citizenship
We reserve our outrage for spectacular corruption: The scam worth thousands of crores, the politician caught taking bribes, the contractor accused of fraud. Those deserve condemnation.
But nations are rarely weakened by grand corruption alone. They are quietly exhausted by millions of ordinary people committing extraordinarily ordinary acts of dishonesty while convincing themselves that no real harm has been done.
I sometimes think of those naked poles still standing in my village. They remind me that development is not measured only by what a government builds. It is measured equally by what citizens choose not to destroy.
India often asks why public services are poor, why infrastructure deteriorates so quickly, why governments hesitate to provide better amenities. We rarely ask the more uncomfortable question: Have we earned the public goods we demand?
Perhaps that is India’s most overlooked development challenge. Before we become a developed economy, we must become a society that recognises a railway blanket, a solar panel and a park bench for what they truly are — not the government’s property, but our own.
Only then will progress stop disappearing in the middle of the night.
Rana is a Gurgaon-based writer and research scholar at MDU, Rohtak
The passenger travelling in an air-conditioned coach is rarely stealing because they cannot afford a bedsheet. The executive pocketing office supplies is not acting out of deprivation. Hunger explains survival. It does not explain entitlement. 
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