Gurgaon City, India—growth and progress when there is absence of government

The fastest developing city in India came about not because of government meddling or planning but through private initiatives. All basic amenities or infrastructure are provided by the private sector. A decade ago, this place didn't even exist. And now it has proven to become the best example to be followed by other communities in India and the world.

It is now home to many multinational companies and brands, creating a big boost for job opportunities and at the same time taking care of their "brain drain" issue. They say that more skilled people are now coming back to India to work in Gurgaon.

Professionals who migrate are not traitors. They are merely looking for better opportunities for themselves and for their loved ones. If anything, it is the government who's the traitor: for restricting markets and opportunities here in our own country with red tapes, regulations, and taxation—something Gurgaon has proven to be unnecessary. In fact, it was the absence of govenrment that made the exponential growth of Gurgaon possible.

The Gurgaon City Skyline (source: http://flic.kr/p/pohYy)

In the New York Times article about it, they interview this guy who said that Gurgaon has become the "pacemaker" for other cities in India, a role model of sorts. And this reminds me of my post about Paul Romer's Charter Cities idea. As I have said there, the benefits of the free market will be so attractive that it will inevitably spread itself. This is exactly how Hong Kong influenced China into having a more liberalized market economy, something that he says alleviated more poverty than any other thing we've tried in the longest time.

The more governments constrict out markets the less prosperous we become. In many sectors, if they could just step back and allow more competiton and invite more investors, prices will go down, services will be better, there will be more job opportunities, and our economy will surely grow much faster than the promises and estimates of economic planners.

In my post about Singapore, I mentioned that we have thousands of islands that could possibly be just as prosperous as Hong Kong, Singapore, and now Gurgaon. But to achieve that, freer markets and less government is what we need.