26 min • 1 lectures
In 1902, French colonial officials in Hanoi faced a significant public health threat. While modernizing the city with European-style infrastructure, they constructed an extensive sewer system that unintentionally provided an ideal habitat for rats. With the bubonic plague looming, the administration launched an extermination campaign. To involve the local population, officials offered a cash bounty for every rat killed. To manage the logistics of disposing of thousands of carcasses, the government decided to accept severed rat tails as proof of a kill. The analysis examines the planning behind these sanitation efforts and the colonial logic that shaped urban public health. The bounty program became a classic example of a perverse incentive. Rather than eliminating the rodents, the policy created a new economy centered on rat tails. Residents discovered they could earn more by catching rats, removing their tails, and releasing the live animals back into the sewers to breed. Historical accounts suggest that some individuals even established rat farms to maximize their earnings. This study explores how the colonial administration’s reliance on a proxy metric failed to achieve the goal of plague prevention. It highlights the unintended consequences of top-down governance, the resilience of local agency, and the importance of aligning metrics with actual outcomes in policy design.
