This is an apocryphal story recounted by Arun Mehta about why India doesn't have 100% literacy
"Old friends on the list will pardon the repetition, but a very wise Pakistani friend answered for me, once and for all, the vexing question of why even after 5 decades of independence and relative peace, only half of us are even literate, while in Vietnam it took them, what, around a decade(?) to eradicate illiteracy. He told me that when two big landlords in his country have a fight, and one wants to really needle the other, he opens a school in a village that is under the control of the other landlord. Proper education is only available to the elite in the world, not because we cannot afford universal education, but at least partly because the elite fear that it creates troublemakers, people who grumble when they're being exploited.
So, whether it is health, education, what have you, all efforts to bring these to villages will benefit from the ability of the poor themselves to grumble, to make trouble for the errant bureaucrats"
