A life in India
Enormous room to climb and very little to catch you. Medicine is paid for in cash, mostly, and mostly by families.
In One Life, an Indian life is born in Pune, Kochi, Indore, Jaipur, Nagpur or Bhubaneswar. Children go to school in an auto-rickshaw that takes six of them at once. The year runs through the hot season, the monsoon, the festival season and the cool season, not through four seasons. The money is in rupees.
What the game gives you
School in India builds towards the board exams — the Class 10 boards and then the Class 12 boards — and few moments in an Indian childhood in the game matter more. A good result opens the way to university and to careers that pay many times what the average job does. India in the game has enormous room to climb.
What it does not have is much to catch you. Most medical care is paid for in cash, mostly by families, and an illness in an Indian life can take years of savings. The state old-age pension starts at 60 in the game and is very small. Family is the safety net: children support parents, and the game plays that obligation.
India is also the country that receives more money from its people abroad than any other in the world.
Money in the game
The game sets each country’s money against the United States, then shows it in local currency, here in rupees at a fixed rate of ₹83 to the dollar. In a life here, an ordinary job pays about 12% of what the same job pays in the US, and everyday prices are about 22% of American prices. A university education costs about 30% of the American price, and medical bills about 1.4 times what an American pays out of pocket for the same illness.
Those ratios are the shape of a life here. Pay is about an eighth of the American figure and prices under a quarter, so a good job goes a long way. Illness is the great danger: an Indian life pays more out of pocket for medicine than an American one, against far lower pay.
The odds
The UN estimates life expectancy at birth in India at about 73 years (71 for men, 74 for women). In Random Life, India comes up more often than any other country, because more of the world’s babies are born there than anywhere else. In the game, an Indian life is a life of steep odds both ways.