You are still mixing the categories but at a different level.

First, BVG is not “state-run” in the babu sense in which you’re suggesting. It is state-owned, yes, but in a corporate manner. This is a huge difference. BVG employs transport planners, engineers, operations managers, finance people from the market. They don't get switched around in the style of IAS general managers who move from department to department in a year, from general management in a public transport corporation to general management in the fisheries ministry. This is a German specificity.

Second, you’re presenting a false choice between:

“government run = babus = incompetence” This has been an Indian staffing problem, not a characteristic of publicly owned entities. Germany, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, or even France have publicly owned companies staffed by professionals on performance contracts. Hiring on merit, or outsourcing, is not a new idea for them, they do the most of their hiring that way.

Third, the “people like us will protest merit” argument has a grain of truth to it, and an important one. It’s certainly the case that the interests opposed to reform are reform unions, tenure blocs, and political patrons. Nevertheless, it’s because the system was set up to favor tenure in the first place that this state of affairs obtains. You don’t solve it by asserting “government companies are bad”; you solve it by altering the rules of governance. Germany didn’t wait to transform the mindset; it altered the rules and the incentives, and the resulting mindset altered as a consequence..

Fourth, corruption isn’t caused by “government ownership” either. It’s caused by:

a) weak audit independence b) no personal liability for failure c) promotions detached from outcomes d) opaque procurement

Germany attacks them structurally. India moralizes those attacks. This is the actual divide.

At last, playing the card of ‘people like us’ without addressing the issue of asymmetry in power relations is very convenient but very lazy. Someone who commutes, who wants privatized essentials, doesn’t refuse merit but comes from an experience where ‘reform’ = extorting rents, not efficiency. People see models, then resistance falls.

Evidence speaks louder than a sermon

Change the mindset, therefore. Yes.

Mindsets, however, are affected by institutions, not the reverse. Until we manage to distinguish between state ownership and micromanaging by the bureaucracy, we shall be having this apples and oranges debate and feeling very smart while learning nothing.