Question

The British colonized India from 1858 to 1947. That means that they ruled the country. They governed the Indian people. They used India to make wealth for the British Empire. But they also developed India. They built canals and railroads. They tried to make India more like the United Kingdom. Yet India was different from the UK. It was more rustic. The ecology was different too. Some British colonists had a hard time adapting. The snakes were particularly troubling. The capital area of Delhi was overrun with venomous cobras. Encountering a cobra is quite frightening. It's even worse getting bit by one. The cobras killed many colonists. Enough died that the British government took action. They paid a bounty for every dead cobra. The program was a success at first. Many people hunted and killed the cobras for the rewards. The number of cobras dropped. The colonists felt safer. But then it became harder to catch cobras. So enterprising people started breeding them. After all, it is easier to catch a pet cobra than a wild one. News of this scheme got back to the British government. They learned that people were breeding cobras to earn rewards. This is not what the British wanted to happen. They felt foolish. They scrapped the program. Now the breeders were angry. Raising cobras can be challenging. They were doing it for the money. When the program ended, the snakes were worthless. So the breeders released them into the wild. Now there were more wild cobras than when the program started. The British plan seemed like a good idea at first. In practice though, it made things much worse. This is the cobra effect. The cobra effect is when a solution worsens a problem. Many well-intentioned programs backfire. In 2014 the City of Chicago banned lightweight plastic bags. Single use bags are bad for the environment. They end up in the water. They pollute the land. City officials wanted people to reuse bags. So they put a tax on lightweight bags. Retailers did not want to anger customers with the new tax. So they made their bags much thicker. The new bags were 150 times thicker than the old bags. The thicker bags were no longer lightweight, so they weren't taxed. But most customers did not reuse these bags. They just threw away the really thick plastic bags. This is another example of the cobra effect. The city intended to reduce plastic waste, yet the tax worsened it 150 fold. Our actions do not always have the consequences that we expect.
Explain the cobra effect in your own words. Use an example from the text or your experience to describe the cobra effect.

Answer 1

The cobra effect was experienced by the British colonizers in India in order to get rid of Cobra, and by Chicago to get rid of plastic pollution.

What is the cobra effect?

The cobra effect is given as the worsening of the situation with the implementation of a solution. The name came when the Britishers in India to get rid of the keeping cobra as pets made the rule of not allowing it, and the cobra population increases and worsen the situation.

The cobra effect is thereby further seen in many places, such as the efforts of the Chicago government to reduce the use of plastic. But the implementation of a tax on lightweight plastic introduces the use and the deposition of the heavy-weight plastic.

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