The unintended consequences of Sod's Law.

"English speakers are very much India's elite, and their proportion may be shrinking, new data on the demographic profile of English language speakers in India suggests," wrote Rukmini S. "528 million speak Hindi as a first language." "The 2011 Census showed that English is the primary language -- mother tongue -- of 256,000 people, second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million people, making it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi." Only 20% of people are bilingual, though a survey by Lokniti Foundation puts the figure at 37.5%. That is most surprising because, "India has 22 official languages with 6,000-plus dialects and 55-plus languages with 1 million-plus speakers." With people free to move to anywhere within the country one would expect people to move to more prosperous areas in search of jobs and learn the local language. "On the face of it, internal migrants represented 30 percent of India's population in 2001. But this number is deceptively large: two-thirds were migrants within districts, and more than half were women migrating for marriage," wrote Z Kone et al. Accounting for barriers such as "physical distance and linguistic differences between districts", "state borders still emerged as critical impediments to mobility". State borders were found to inhibit migration of men more than women, of younger men of working age and "the more educated were more reluctant to cross state lines". The authors suggested that it maybe because "many social benefits are not portable across state boundaries". A survey of India's consumer economy (ICE 360 survey) found that 97% of the poorest fifth, or 20%, of the population live in their own homes, compared to 81% for the richest 20%. "A mere 28% of India's city dwellers live in a rented house, compared to 1961 "when a majority of them (54%) used to live in a rented house instead of owning one", wrote A Sreevatsan. The Economic Survey 2017-18 found that "12% of the total housing stock in urban India remains vacant. Mumbai has 500,000 vacant houses, followed by Delhi which has 300,000 vacant houses". The reason why people are reluctant to let their properties out on rent is because of the draconian rent control laws which were enacted to protect poor tenants. Since court cases take forever in India it is almost impossible to evict a tenant. The result is that people are forced to live in slums in Mumbai even as half a million properties lie vacant. While the Right to Education Act has failed to improve standards of learning in our schools, the upper classes are spending a fortune on extracurricular activities of their children. Thus, measures to help the poor are keeping them tied to poverty. The law of unintended consequences. Or, we can call it 'Sod's Law'.