Shortchanging as a culture in India
We have a culture of shortchanging customers that extends to the smallest things. Indian Railways provides paper cups for chai, with the correct level (150ml) clearly marked. I have yet to find a chai vendor who fills the cup to the right amount. It's always less, sometimes startlingly so. When I ask the cups be properly filled, I get a variety of excuses. The chai will spill. The cup will be too hot to hold. These are the old cups, the new ones are smaller. All these false statements are made with a straight face, and I wonder if the vendors actually believe what they are saying. (For a long time, when the official price of a cup of chai was ₹7, the vendors were collecting ₹10. If one considers the scale of operations, that was a sizeable skimming. I only found it out accidentally on the Railways website.) Why do we have such a culture? Ethics in business is an oxymoron in India.