> My ancestral family is from village and small towns, and counterintuitively they tend to be much cleaner because they have more formally defined municipal and local governments.

Indian, and this is not counterintuitive to me at all. I have also seen this, really small rural villages with their tight local governments tend to be pretty clean.

Yep. The added issue is half of the "cities" non-Indians visit in India aren't actually zoned as cities.

In essence, India had hidden urbanization occur [0], but zoning never caught up to it.

[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...