From Calcutta to California: Left-wing policies fueling poverty worldwide

Walk in the streets of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and you will barely find space to move. Walk in the streets of some cities in California and you will barely meet a soul on the road. Two completely different worlds, with a simple reason for the difference — poverty and wealth.

My first week in San Jose, CA was rather amusing. Unlike the cities of Vancouver and Norwich, in which I previously lived, the outskirts of San Jose had limited public transportation, which is understandable given the high reliance on cars for transportation.

More often than not, I would be the only person walking down the street, and the only person waiting for a bus — actions for which my fellow millennials must think I’m crazy. Why don’t I use Uber or Lyft they think? Only a week earlier, I was in the crazy streets of India where walking space was premium, and owning a car is considered a luxury for many middle class.

In fact, nearly 80 percent of people in India’s metro cities travel on foot every day for distances up to half a mile. In some cities, people walk up to 6 miles for work, spending almost 4 hours of their day walking to and from their office.

One of the major factors is the affordability of private and public transportation. While most cities in India have affordable low-cost public transportation, two of its metro cities were ranked among the top ten least affordable public transportation systems globally.