What if the problem is the reverse? India is so poor with such extreme inequality because property rights are so ridiculously difficult to maintain and hence everything’s in the black market?

The one piece missing here is the social structural analysis. In post-independence India, the state has consistently intervened deliberately on behalf of big companies through effective subsidies (like capital industries investments during Nehru or land grabs for SEZs in the post Emergency period) – this is directly tied into the inability of the government to discipline big capital but also to the strength that stronger social classes have over the weakest segments of society in the political order. Hence, property rights are difficult to maintain – because they don’t serve the interests of accumulation (in this case, primitive accumulation in the countryside) or those classes. See here for one theory that’s been applied to describe this process in India. Not sure if I buy it yet.

http://www.mongabay.com/deforestation_pcover.htm

Forest coverage according to UN Food and Agricultural Organization as of 2003.

India: forest cover 64,113,000 hectares

China: 163,380,000 hectares

The first map is misleading, there is more wood cutting in India than China because India has more wood to cut. China almost doesn’t have any, so they are cutting Indonesia’s, and also India’s.

It’s wood that’s being cut that is not being replaced. Countries not on the map may be cutting more timber, but also replacing more timber as well.

Sure, still what I said holds. I was only talking about the comparison between India and China. India has more forest than China, which has almost no forest, so it will show up as not cutting wood. While in reality, it is cutting others’ wood, particularly in Indonesia. And also killing others; tigers and rhinos and God knows what else.

It’s wood that’s being cut that is not being replaced. Countries not on the map may be cutting more timber, but also replacing more timber as well.

The first map is misleading, there is more wood cutting in India than China because India has more wood to cut. China almost doesn’t have any, so they are cutting Indonesia’s, and also India’s.

are strictly defined property rights in a country with such extreme inequality really a good thing

What if the problem is the reverse? India is so poor with such extreme inequality because property rights are so ridiculously difficult to maintain and hence everything’s in the black market?

clear property rights delineation is almost always a govt function that libertarians do agree to….

It’s funny, I read Gandhi’s autobiography when I was I was in college expecting him to drop some knowledge on me regarding non-violence and freedom. Instead, he spent most of the book talking about the need for sanitation and equitable distribution of labor and natural resources. I guess the man really was ahead of his time, in more ways than one.