The Airavat Club Class once had a slogan: Sleep Like a Baby.
Anyone who's recently taken the Bengaluru–Udupi night run knows the promise is kept — just not how the marketing intended. Infant babies don't sleep at night. They jerk awake, cry, and make everyone miserable. The Airavat, with its shattered suspension and bullock-cart rattle over every crack in the road, delivers exactly this. For Rs. 1,650.
The same journey on a private bus: Rs. 600.
When I asked the driver why, he didn't shrug. He laughed — that resigned, knowing laugh of someone who has filed the same maintenance request for years and watched it disappear into silence. The buses, he explained, run without servicing. Damaged parts are never replaced. The money simply isn't there.
It's somewhere else.
Here's where it went.
Karnataka's free bus scheme costs KSRTC roughly Rs. 10–12 crore every single day. The government promised to reimburse the corporation. The reimbursements are chronically delayed, consistently partial, and structurally insufficient. KSRTC was already bleeding Rs. 2,000–3,000 crore annually before the scheme launched. Now it is borrowing to pay salaries while the fleet quietly falls apart on the roads.
So the passenger willing to pay Rs. 1,600 for a working recliner and a functional suspension — the one who is generating actual revenue — gets a vehicle that hasn't been serviced in years. His money doesn't fix his bus. It subsidises the political promise that won the last election.
He pays more. He receives less. The difference vanishes into the deficit.
This is not a KSRTC story. This is not even a Karnataka story.
This is how socialism works. Every single time.
The pattern is this: Government promises more than the productive economy can sustain. It finances the promise by extracting from the parts of the economy that still function. Maintenance is deferred. Investment is postponed. The feedback loop that tells producers what consumers need — the price signal — is severed. Standards fall. The wealthy exit to private alternatives. The poor are left with what the state can still afford, which is less and less of a diminishing whole.
Venezuela had the world's largest proven oil reserves. Chavez sold petrol domestically for fractions of a cent per litre — cheaper than water, literally. The money that would have maintained refineries and trained engineers went into social spending. By 2019, those refineries ran at 10% capacity. The country with the most oil on earth was importing refined fuel. Inflation hit one million percent. Seven million people fled.
Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times. Sri Lanka expanded subsidies until 2022, when it ran out of petrol, medicine, and cooking gas simultaneously. Citizens stormed the president's residence. He fled.
Cuba's literacy rate is genuinely impressive. Its schools are also crumbling, teachers earn a few dollars a month, and the textbooks are decades old. The people who can't leave queue in the dark for rationed food.
In every case: a benefit was promised. Something else was quietly subtracted. The subtraction compounded. And eventually, the maintenance bill that had been deferred, and deferred, and deferred again — arrived.
The economist Friedrich Hayek called this the knowledge problem.
No central planner — however brilliant, however well-intentioned — possesses the real-time information that millions of individual transactions automatically generate and communicate. When you buy a Rs. 1,600 bus ticket, you are telling the market: I value this comfort at this price. Maintain it or lose me. That signal keeps the suspension repaired, the seats clean, the service competitive.
When the government redirects that money to a political objective, the signal is destroyed. The bus has no revenue incentive to improve. The free bus has no revenue incentive to exist at a quality above zero. Both ends collapse toward the same point: the Airavat experience.
The equal sharing of misery. Not a metaphor. A documented outcome, repeated across a century, on every continent where it has been attempted.
Here is what socialism actually promises: We will take from those who are generating value and give to those who are not — and everyone will be better off.
Here is what it delivers: The person generating value receives a deteriorating service at an increasing price. The person receiving the subsidy receives a benefit that degrades every year as the system that funds it hollows out. Both end up worse than they would have been in a functional market. The only winner is the politician who announced the scheme in an election year and will not be accountable for the broken bus three years later.
The Airavat driver knows all of this. He knows why his maintenance requests go nowhere. He knows what the money is being used for. He knows he can't fix it. He laughed when I asked him, because what else do you do when you understand a system perfectly and have zero power to change it? That laugh is the sound of socialism at the individual scale — the resigned expertise of a man trapped inside a logic he didn't design and cannot escape. The bus that promised to make you sleep like a baby made good on the promise. You didn't sleep. You suffered. You paid Rs. 1,600 for the privilege.
And somewhere, someone won an election.
Courtesy: @Rohith Chakrathirtha (Facebook post dated 2026-06-22)
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