In Patna, a tiny Sudha milk booth has anchored the corner of my street for more than ten years, a permanent fixture supplying the capital with Comfed’s fresh milk.

Then, overnight, it was dismantled and its owner forced to sell in the open in the chilly winter. The formal reason offered was simple and lawful: the structure was “illegally” on the road. The informal truth, on the contrary, was uglier: a demand for ₹15,000 from local police and municipal officials — more than three times the “regular payment” that had long bought informal operating rights — had gone unanswered. The vendor could not pay the new price, and legality was suddenly rediscovered.

This is not a story about encroachment. It is a story about governance or a conversation between state and its citizens.

India does not suffer from a lack of rules. It suffers from an excess of unenforced ones. We are far ahead in rule-making and far behind in execution — a classic case of state scope outrunning state capacity. The state claims the authority to regulate almost everything, but lacks the administrative, institutional, and political capacity to enforce those rules uniformly. That misalignment creates predictable incentives. Expanding the rulebook is politically cheap. Drafting stringent laws signals resolve and moral seriousness. Enforcement, by contrast, is costly. It requires manpower, coordination, monitoring, and sustained attention. Policymakers therefore maximise scope and defer execution. The result is a vast stock of laws that exist mostly on paper.

When rules cannot be applied universally, they are applied selectively. And when enforcement is selective, the law ceases to be a public good and becomes a latent weapon — available to be used, withheld, or monetised

This is why street vendors routinely pay “regular” bribes to police and municipal officials. Studies consistently show that vendors surrender a significant share of their earnings in predictable payments that function like an informal tax. These payments buy tolerance, not legality. The violation — encroachment, obstruction, zoning — is not eliminated because it is the asset that generates rent. Once this equilibrium stabilises, officials are incentivised not to fix the problem, but to preserve it.

The same logic governs traffic enforcement. Auto-rickshaws and buses block junctions daily, creating visible hazards with impunity. Yet a lone motorcyclist without a helmet or a car driver without a seatbelt is swiftly pulled over. This is not hypocrisy; it is economic rationality. Individual motorists are low-risk, high-yield targets. The offence is clear, the offender is isolated, and a few hundred rupees can settle the matter instantly. By contrast, enforcing rules against organised transport or politically protected encroachments is costly and dangerous.

Selective enforcement is therefore not a failure of logic. It is the logical outcome of weak state capacity operating under broad regulatory scope. For instance, the smooth traffic for the VIP movement exposes this reality. When political stakes are high, roads clear, signals work, and enforcement becomes suddenly effective. Capacity exists — it is simply rationed. Everyday disorder is not accidental; it is equilibrium. A system optimised for extraction, not welfare.

Ironically, weak capacity does not reduce power; it concentrates it at the lowest levels. The more unrealistic the rules, the greater the discretion of the constable, clerk, or inspector. When everyone is technically in violation, compliance becomes negotiable. Legality acquires a price.

Some might point to recent anti-corruption drives as evidence of correction: Bihar’s vigilance agencies publicly report dozens of arrests, raids that have uncovered crores in cash, jewellery and property documents. The Vigilance Investigation Bureau and the Special Vigilance Unit have both announced dozens of arrests in 2025 alone — hard evidence that predation exists and that some effort is made to root it out. But punishing individuals without altering incentives does not change the equilibrium, as these operations, while necessary, are not the same as building a capacity for fair, predictable governance. Arrests of individual culprits are one-off remedies; they do not change the daily incentives that push a frontline official toward petty rent-seeking.

The milk booth’s demolition was not about restoring order. It was about a failed renegotiation in an informal market for rights. And until governance reforms confront the core problem — the mismatch between what the state promises to regulate and what it can actually enforce — such stories will continue. Real reform begins not with more rules, but with fewer, simpler, enforceable ones. Until then, the Indian state will remain paradoxical: strict on paper, arbitrary on the street — omnipresent in law, absent in practice, and predatory in execution.

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