Who is to blame…?

World over, prices of oil are rising like never before and most of the economists and energy trades call is a pure speculation. Some people blame OPEC for not meeting the world oil demands where as other blame the developing countries like India and China for create a demand-supply imbalance. But back home, in India, the issue has several facets. For a country like India, which imports 90% of its oil requirement, the imbalances in the world oil market are something that needs to be looked into very seriously. But given the fact that the regulations and business structure of the oil industry in India is so complicated, the need for looking into international oil imbalances seems a lesser priority to me.

One most important thing that we need to look into first is myopic vision and negligence on part of Government as well as the oil companies. On one side the government tries to woo the common man with subsidized energy items and on the other side it’s not ready to revise its excise and sales duty rules. Myopic vision of the government is on display every time we see a sharp price hike in India. Our government notices the international oil markets only when there is a sharp rise in the oil prices and by that time it’s too late. May be that’s a politically wise decision, cause now you can blame the international oil prices for the hike in domestic prices.

And myopic vision of the oil companies is exhibited through their cries claming being in loss, every time oil prices in international markets move north-wards.

LPG and Kerosene is highly subsidized in India because common man uses it everyday. It’s a good rule as long as we all stick to the rule. But in India, no one does stick to the rule. Hotel owners, caterers and LPG vehicle owners use the 14Kg LPG cylinders (which is meant only for the home usage) bluntly flouting the norms. In most of the rural parts of India, Kerosene is an alternate to diesel (Kerosene is subsidized only for the home usage). Diesel, as per the government is subsidized because it’s used by the most of the middle class into the transportation businesses. But these days diesel is used for power generation by everyone (households and business houses alike), beyond the allowed limits. These illegal activities disturb the demand supply equation causing a spurt in demand in a short period of time. Government’s calculations of the subsidy are based on the average usage of LP/Kerosene by a household. These averages are standard and only figure that can change these calculations is the population. Based on these figures government promises a subsidy figure to the oil companies. Oil companies then subtract this subsidy from their target price and thus a price of oil is decided. In real life the most subsidized energy items are sold the most, much more than the government’s expectations and then government is not in a position to pay the promised subsidies to the oil companies. These things are happening years after years and neither government not the PSU authorities are willing to look into the matter. The PSE authorities wake up only after looking at their quarterly balance sheets. When they realize that they are into a mess, they start running from minister to minister to some sanctions bestowed to them. For last few years government accumulated all this mess by issuing “Oil Bonds” (Oil Bonds is a pathetic trick found by someone to postpone the expenses in future. May be, I will talk about it in another article) and when things started going out of control government hiked the prices of all energy items blaming the international oil prices.

I do agree that there is an international imbalance in the demand-supply of oil, but I also believe that if India gets it domestic demand-supply straightened and all its subsidy programs restructured, we all can see cheaper oil in India too. Oil companies should strictly sell the LPG(14kg)/Kerosene (subsidized) only to the households and they should also make sure that the usage of diesel for power generation is not beyond the allowed limit. These two initiatives will ease the demand pressure to some extent. Its said – “Its never too late”.

Getting the acts together

I was reading interview of Mr. Deepak Parekh (chairman, HDFC) in The Indian Express yesterday. The interview was mainly around the current economical concerns around the globe and specifically in India. Mr. Parekh thinks that even if there is a bit of recession all over the world, India still has an inherent opportunity to make it big in terms of GDP growth. As per him only way to achieve this is getting our acts together. I was pretty convinced with his argument.

He gives two examples to support his stance. One is of the Mundra power project that was awarded to a private player a year ago but nothing has happened yet on the project. The reason is they are still to get approvals from some government departments, while major ministries have cleared the proposal. Another example he sites is of Orissa. Orissa is mineral and ore rich state and they successfully carved out the deal with Posco to setup their iron ore plant in Orissa. But everything seems to be stopped now. Orissa government is reluctant about letting their iron ores to be used in the steel plants in other states because these states are making a lot of money where as Orissa is getting pennies in royalty for providing the iron ores. There is one department of government which enables setting up hi-tech plants in joint venture with companies from developed countries and there is another department of government which is not even ready to revise its age old royalty rates for providing iron ores to steel plants. If steel prices can change as per global cues, then why can’t the royalty on iron ore? Government is failing to get its acts together.

Look at any industry sector in India and there are several government agencies with their own set of policies, administering the sector. A prominent builder in Pune was telling in an interview that to complete a project a builder needs to have clearances from 63 different departments of government. This includes both the state government as well as central government departments. Policy changes in the departments at national level are impacted by the global economical environment, where as these changes in the departments at state level have more impact of the conditions in the local markets/economy. So most of the times policy changes at state and national level go in opposite directions hampering the development. What government needs to do is get its acts together by making sure that the policy in the concerned departments are not going out of synch with each other as well with the time and changes in the technology.

I remember reading in of the news papers that workers in the Harayana were protesting against the government policies that provided a tax concession to automobile industry if they setup plants in Himachal Pradesh. Government had a genuine objective of developing Himachal Pradesh as an automobile industry hub there by providing employment to local youths. But industries from Harayana started shifting their units to Himachal Pradesh to get the benefits of tax concession, there by impacting the employment in Harayana. While making the policy if government had considered putting in a clause that only newly started plants can get the concession in tax and not the shifted plants, the situation may have been different.

With general election ahead, I don’t think that government is in any mood to make any kind of changes to the policies now. All the parties will be concentrating on the common man and their needs. Lets hope that the next government that comes into power will seriously look into this issues and clear the way for development of India.

Carrying the bucket or building the pipeline..!!!

——————————-

I also write technical articles here

——————————

“Building the pipeline”, “Carrying the bucket”, have you heard these words before? I happen to hear these words quite often these days. And I almost ended up laughing when I first came to know the meaning of these words. Carrying the bucket means working as an employee somewhere and building the pipeline means setting up one’s own business. What I don’t understand is one uses a pipeline or a bucket, either ways the water will be delivered to the same pot. Then shouldn’t we be concentrating on the more important question of “whose pot is this in reality?” rather than basing our theories on the methods employed to fill this pot. 

What I’m talking about are the so called MLM (Multi Level Marketing) companies, not all the MLM companies but the ones that make people fall prey to their faulty pyramid building methodologies. Let’s not get into the technicalities of how these companies deceive more than half the people who join them and why some countries have banned such companies. The links towards the end of this article throw more light on that. Purpose behind the article is to talk about a few arguments that the believers of such schemes make against non-believers, and which I found to be equally applicable to them in some cases or totally immature in others.

One of the very common arguments that these people make is “People in the job (call them employees in some organizations) don’t work for themselves but for their employers”. How true!! What about the people who promote MLM schemes promising huge returns in a short span of time? They too make the people above them in the pyramid make money. Every time the person above you (This is the same person who made you join such scheme) earns lot more than what you earn. Ultimately, here too, people are working for others. At least someone like me (who is an employee) knows whom he is working for. Such is the fate of the people joining this fraudulent MLM scheme that they don’t even know who is taking the major share of their money.

Another argument that these guys make is – “People like Birlas and Ambanis are making money through our hard-work”. This argument seems very immature to me and this again boils down to the same thing. Someone who started this MLM thing is building his castles on all the hard work that these quick-buck dreamers are doing. Birlas and Ambanis (or any other business houses for that matter) are all visionary people, they are building something that will last forever and won’t end up in people loosing their hard earned money. They are contributing to the GDP of the country, where as these fraudulent MLM companies are taking the savings of common man out of the country.

Here is another one – “We are not making people join the scheme, we are creating leaders”. That’s really very immature and childish to me. These people are doing something by delivering a few seminars; even IIMs think that they can’t do that in two rigorous years on their campus. One very fundamental thing that these people forget is that leaders are born and are not created.

I have many other arguments made by these MLM guys, but these more of personal sort. And putting them in here would make this article very lengthy. My purpose of writing this article is to start a patient and mature debate over the advantages and disadvantage of not so genuine MLM schemes (I reiterate again, not all MLM things are fraud, Tupperware in US for example is pretty genuine thing).

I would urge you all to go through this link (and all the links on that page) before making uninformed statements/decisions.

http://users.openface.ca/~cobe/eth/quest.html

Free inter-bank ATM withdrawals

—————————-

I also write technical articles here

—————————

RBI directed all the banks to make the inter-bank ATM balance inquiries free after 1^st April 2008. RBI has also directed to make inter-bank ATM withdrawals free after 1^st April 2009. The former move seems appealing though the later needs a second thought as it poses a lot of operations issues. These issues need to be addressed before making this move effective.

 I’m not sure how banks settle the inter-bank ATM withdrawals now. The process must need extra work on part of both the banks involved in the withdrawal. Also the process may not be as standardized as the one for clearing of the cheques. When the inter-bank ATM withdrawals will become free, volume of such transactions will be very high given the fact that ATMs of all the banks are not uniformly distributed in any of the city in India. So no one will find the ATMs of all the banks in the near vicinity. And when the withdrawals from any ATM won’t charge anything, why would someone go for hunting for their own bank’s ATM. This high volume of such transactions needs a very precise and thoroughly scrutinized process of settlement between the banks. There also will be a need to dispute settlement authorities. RBI needs to think of these issues in the next 12 months.

Pushing our thoughts a little deeper, another issue comes to my mind. Handing of such a high inter-bank ATM withdrawal transactions will require the banks to deploy more man power and that’s going to cost them extra money. Currently the cost of handling these transactions may be covered by the inter-bank ATM withdrawal charges. With these charges no more applicable, banks profit margins will be hit. In such a scenario, the deposit/loan rates may get impacted depending on the volume of such transactions.

 Another issue that may arise is the opening of new ATMs. If a bank’s customer can freely use any bank’s ATM, then why would a bank open new ATM? The long queues outside any bank’s ATM definitely call for opening of lot of new ATMs. Also remote and outskirts parts of the city lack the availability of the ATMs. The new move by RBI may deprive them of the new ATMs for some time to come.

 The security of ATM transactions is also of utmost importance. A few years back I had used by ICICI ATM card in a SBI ATM and the machine never asked me for a PIN. Such security loopholes will lead to increased ATM crimes. Do we have any norms as to which bank is liable for the loss in case of ATM crime happening because of the security lapses during inter-bank ATM withdrawals?

 RBI definitely has a lot of homework to do in the next 12 months if they don’t to miss their deadline for making inter-bank ATM withdrawals free. And RBI will be successful in coming up with a effective policy and laws to address all such issues then common man will be more than happy.

Latest additions to listing agreement by SEBI – a good move

SEBI announced a couple of additions to the listing agreement today (Read here). One of the additions deals with monitoring how the companies are investing money that they just collected through the public issue (IPO as we call it). SEBI is making it mandatory for all the companies who have gone public in the recent past to submit a report analyzing how the money, that was raised through the public issue, has been used, to the audits committee along with any remarks made by the audits committee. The companies have also been told to publish the report along with all the comments (good/bad) in the newspapers. 

People who are watching the growth of Indian stock markets in last few years, are very well aware of number of public issues announced every month in India and number of issues which perform below average. Just to give a sneak peek into the statistics, look at the chart below.

   

Since 2005, Indian investors have subscribed to 253 public issues, out of which 22% (55) are giving negative returns which go down to -65%, 10% are providing a return between 0 and 20%, which is not a great number compared to the returns from the existing stocks in the markets. For a country like India where interest in equity investment has risen steeply in last few years, the number ‘253’ itself is quite high. More and more people are investing in stock market and no one is in a mood to miss the IPO bus. Both small and big business houses are making use of this opportunity by issuing IPOs with premium anywhere between 500% and 8000%, which is quite huge.  In this situation, today’s move by SEBI is really commendable. Common investor now can be assured now that if their money is not used by the issuer as he had promised, then investor will at least come to know through SEBI/exchange newsletters or the advertisements in the newspapers (as is made mandatory by SEBI). On a side note, Red Herring Prospectus (released by the issuer along with the IPO) contains the details about how the capital collected through IPO would be put to use. This information is a key input used by most of the analysts to rate the IPOs.

Mission unaccomplished…

While government at the center is talking about the renovation of the cities through the JNNURM (Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission) or transparency in the banking transactions through introduction of KYC (Know Your Client), it is inactive enough to clear the obstacles which are keeping the government from achieving the ultimate objective of such schemes. Recently I witnessed two unique experiences which clearly underline the importance of studying how system works currently and then setting new rules for the game. To keep this reading short I will talk about second experience in another article.

Recently my parents permanently shifted to Pune from our native place (Latur in Maharashtra). We wanted to get his PAN done and we came to know that the SBI passbook serves as both proof of identity and residence, in one, while applying for PAN. Few other government offices also accept the SBI passbook as proof of identity and residence. Now here started the drama. We are staying in a rented house and the rent agreement is in my brother name. The bank officials in the concerned branch of SBI were initially reluctant to accept that document as proof of residence. Somehow they agreed to it but it took a lot of to and fro between different SBI counters. Finally the application was accepted and my father was told to come after 15 days (They say it’s a new rule) to collect the passbook. After 15 days, he was told that the account has been created and come after a week to collect the passbook (No rules here, it’s just the lazy attitude of the staff to procrastinate the work.). Having no other option he went after seven days and finally got the passbook. Story does not end here. Now this passbook somehow had our native address as present residential address. None of the SBI staff was aware of this and they didn’t even know how this all happened. The next strange thing that the bank officials did was that they wrote the current address with a pen (when this address is supposed to be printed) besides the printed one. On top of that the passbook didn’t have his photograph on it. The whole purpose of using this passbook as the proof of identity and proof of residence went for a toss. When my father went to the branch manager to find out what was going on, the manager (as any other government servant) was reluctant to look into the issue but later on asked someone to investigate. Ultimately we came to know that my father has an account in SBI in my native place and hence the system is not accepting our new address and to have the new address on the passbook my father needs to do one of two practically unfeasible things. Get the old account closed (which we cannot do as my father’s pension is credited to that account) or apply for the change of address in the old branch (in my native place). 

I still remember the “surprisingly SBI” campaign that SBI used to convey to the common people that SBI has “surprisingly” changed. Now I know why they said that SBI is “surprisingly” changed. It would really be a great surprise when SBI (and any government office for that matter) will really change to make the customer’s life more comfortable.

Another interesting thing to note here is how SBI is flouting the KYC (Know Your Client) norms set by RBI. KYC makes it compulsory for all the banks to get latest details of their customers registered. And SBI has a system in place which doesn’t accept the recent updates in the customer information and the funny thing is that the SBI officials don’t understand what is happening. Where is common a common man supposed to go from here? RBI is supposed to handle such complaints, but its busy managing inflations, dollar influx, credit growth and what not. Do we need something like BRAI (Banking regulatory authority of India) who will offload the tasks of handling customer complaints and auditing banks to confirm the compliance to the law, from the shoulders of RBI?

The hidden opportunity

Last post elicited few good thoughts on the role of central bank in the appreciation of rupee. One of the readers asked two interesting questions and I am attempting to answer those to the best of my knowledge.

The first question was how to improve the state of exports when the home currency is appreciating. There always are two types of customers in the market, ones who look for the cheap goods and the others who look for the quality goods. If you want to sell your goods you either need to be competitive on either on price or on quality front. All the fuss around appreciating rupee is because Indian exporters are loosing ground on price front because of the costlier home currency. So the other option for Indian exporters, as rightly pointed out by one of columnist in Business Standard, is to improve on the quality of goods. I personally think that there is another reason why Indian exporters should concentrate on the quality. Cheapness is very easy to replicate but quality is not. To add to this, we have laws and acts to prevent replication of quality but not to prevent replication of cheapness. With the world becoming a global nation with countries as constituent states, India should expect a lot of competitors to the cheap goods and services it exports. So it is high time that Indian exporters should shift their attention from price factor to quality factor. But quality doesn’t come overnight. It needs sustained efforts and use of advanced technology and latest research to deliver quality products. We should take a look at the China’s toy industry, which is competitive in both quality and price.

But besides quality there are some other answers to this problem. The Indian industry can adopt innovative ways to reduce the cost of production. There is not one factor which contributes to the reduction in cost of production. Moving towards six-sigma, procuring raw material at low cost, reducing cost of transportation, understanding market dynamics are some factors to mention. All these factors demand importing advanced technology and research from the western world and appreciating home currency is going to make this import cheap. So the Indian manufacturers, who have for long cribbing about the high cost of importing advanced technology, should bank on this opportunity till the rupee is appreciating. This will help not only the export industry which in trouble but also the overall economy.

Government policy is another solution which is working in some of the countries with strong home currency. Most of the American and European countries, which have a strong currency, are competitive in export of some specific goods, though not all. Like USA is competitive in export of some agriculture products, European countries are competitive in export of liquor. Exporters in these countries can sell their produce at low costs because they are compensated by their governments in the form of subsidies, sops and tax breaks. They already have cost benefit when it comes to cost of production and transportation, which results in a large profit margin with lesser market price for their goods. It’s not feasible for government of India to provide subsidies and tax breaks to the tune of what the governments of western countries are providing. Hence Indian government with support from over hundred other nations is trying to get a bill passed with WTO (World Trade Organization) which mandates the developed nations to keep the subsidies and tax breaks in check. The talks are on for a while with no fruitful results as the developed nations are adamant with their demand. Even if the bill gets passed and developed nations remove subsidies and tax breaks from the specified sectors, are Indian exporters in the field of agriculture and liquor competitive enough in terms of quality to snatch the global market share of American and European exporters? The answer is a clear “no”. We are too far behind the western countries in terms of quality of goods and services.

Devaluing our currency is going to help the Indian export industry in the short run, but over a long period it’s the quality of your deliverables which helps you win the battle. The steep appreciation of rupee in the last few months has provided us that hidden opportunity when we can strive to achieve the quality and process to sustain that quality over a long time. Now it’s onto us where to make use of this opportunity or crib over the appreciating rupee. One thing is sure, appreciation of rupee may stall for some time but we must wait for a while before devaluation of rupee starts setting in.

Are we trapped?

We all are surprised by the sudden surge in Sensex, appreciation of rupee, rising interest rates, lower than expected inflation rate and a government which is watching this inactively. Some of us are happy with the stock exchange moves and others are equally sad for the appreciating rupee. There also is a class of people which is apprehensive about all these things, without knowing the fact that all these things are inter-related. It would be quite interesting to know this relation. Let us start with the rising Sensex.

The current rally in exchange is driven by the buying momentum created by the FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors). These institutions bring in dollars to invest in the Indian market, but they can’t invest the dollars in the Indian markets. So they sell these dollars to buy rupees. Lately FIIs have increased their investment in Indian markets multifold and this has resulted in a large inflow of dollar for sell in the currency market. The most capable entity in India to buy these dollars in exchange for rupee is RBI (Reserve Bank of India). But RBI is not buying these dollars, so the condition in the currency market is unbalanced; there is a large demand for and less supply of rupee. Naturally the value of rupee against dollar is increasing. If RBI starts buying dollars and infuses rupee to control this demand-supply unbalance then rupee would be devalued. You must be thinking what is problem with the appreciating rupee. The appreciating rupee makes the Indian exports in the American markets costlier and affects the overall exports. IT industry, exporting its services to America is hardest hit. On the other side, the same appreciating rupee makes imports cheaper and results in increased imports. The overall situation (increasing imports and lowering exports) increases the trade deficit which is not good for the economy of a developing nation.

Another effect of appreciating rupee is on RBI itself. All the dollar reserves of India are held by RBI. And when the dollar gets devalued, the assets of RBI are getting devalued. Then why doesn’t RBI buy those dollars floating in the currency market and keep dollar’s value intact? The answer lies in the economic indicator called inflation. If we remember, rising inflation had been considered a reason for the defeat of ruling government in state elections few months back. Since then RBI has kept (or government has made it keep) on increasing the interest rates. Increased interest rates suck the liquidity out of economy and when there is less cash in the economy, the inflation starts decreasing. RBI, with its policy of increasing the interest rates has successfully brought down the inflation. And the concern in buying the dollars floating in currency markets is that, this will result in increased money flow in the market and will pull the inflation up. Obviously RBI doesn’t want the inflation to rise and hence letting rupee to appreciate.

In the last few weeks the inflation has risen by a quarter percent and the general talk in the market is that RBI may again raise the interest rates to bring down the inflation. With America lowering its interest rates and India increasing its interest rates, the gap is going to increase. This will keep India a favorite investment destination for global financial firms. The net result will be more dollar inflows and more appreciation of rupee.

Some economists believe that for a country whose GDP is growing at more than 8% p.a. should learn to live with somewhat high inflation levels (5-6 %). Current inflation in India is less than 3.5%. The RBI’s take on this is that for the country like India, which is largely dependent on the oil imports for its energy needs, (while global oil markets becoming more and more volatile) it is necessary to keep a strong break on inflation. I don’t hope that the government will intervene to change the situation as its too busy fighting to get India the nuclear deal. I can’t predict what will be next move of whom, so let’s wait and watch.

The strange business model – I

Most people these days say that running an educational institute has become a business for the people who set up and pretend to run these institutes. I beg to differ here. I think that the people who set up the educational institutes are not running them like business and time has come when they need to apply some business principles to the way they are running the institutes.

If we look at the trend in the development of educational institutes in India in last 10 years, one thing becomes quite obvious that the demand for the specific type of education has been increasing and the educational institutes are responding by providing different avenues to the aspiring students. There have been a lot of new institutes being setup and tremendous capacities being added to the existing institutes. This is all in response to the rising demand for the specific skills-sets from the industry. The demand supply logic is working perfectly fine in this part of the story, the increased demand of the industry is being compensated for by the increased supply from the educational institutes and hence rise in cost of financing the skilled work-force has been kept in check. But something is wrong in the other part of the story. The demand for the students created by these newly started institutes, which are quite high in numbers and in capacity, is perfectly compensated by the students excited about acquiring the skills that the industry is looking for. But the cost of financing the education is on rise instead of remaining stable if not falling down, though there are more than required students available to any reasonably settled educational institutes. So now there are more and more students, financing their education at higher and higher costs and thus injecting more and more money into the educational institute system. But we are not witnessing any significant uptrend in the quality of education that is being offered at most of these recently started institutes. If we want to see some quality education being offered in these institutes, then the people who are running these institutes need to treat running the institute as running a business, rather in the services domain and apply management and business principles to improve the quality of the service they provide, effectively invest their revenues and provide a commitment to its customers in terms of long term effectiveness of their services.

Let’s have a look at two specific types of educations and different trends emerged in those in last few years. Before emergence of IT, the demand for both engineers and management graduates was limited and driven mostly by the traditional Indian businesses. A few years back completing engineering from a private institute set one back by not more than Rs. 60000 in case of free seat and 150000 in case of payment seat. The figures for management were no different (There were no free seats for management).After the IT boom the demand for engineers and management graduates became so high that smart people took advantage of the situation by setting up institutes to offer these course at exorbitantly high cost. Today earning an engineering degree from a private institute costs anything from 150000 to 320000 with no free seats available. The management degree sets you back by anything from 200000 to 350000. This is more than hundred percent increases in the cost of financing professional education in just a few years. Now consider the increased capacities of the existing institutes and the institutes that are newly started, and this has a multiplicative effect on the amount of money that being poured into the educational institutes in last few years. Where is this money going? We don’t see any significant improvement in the quality of education except for posh buildings of the colleges and ultra-modern infrastructure on campus. A student is paying a huge sum of money to enjoy this infrastructure on the campus of a newly started private institute when some other student is paying the same amount to enjoy the knowledge sharing sessions with some of the best brains in India inside the classrooms of the elite institutes like IITs and IIMs.

Isn’t the business model adopted by the private educational institutes a flawed one? While teaching management principles to their students these institutes have forgotten to apply the same to their business to make it more effective in long term. They seem to be least bothered about the way they are investing their revenues just to attract more and more students. This may pose some grave issues in front of us if we fail to address this issue in time. The time won’t be too far when this bubble in the business of education bursts like the one in the real estate and our next generation will curse us for offering them an education without quality.

 

To be continued in part II

Are we upto the mark?

 

I thought of writing down some of my experiences in US which I thought would be useful and interesting to read. I would start with one of the small repairing work that went on, on one of the pavements on my way to office.

It was my first day to office and I was very much amused by the atmosphere of the northwestern university, you really never feel that you are inside the campus of a university. And as I was walking on the footpath watching different departments of the great northwestern university, I was obstructed by a damaged footpath and all of a sudden my imaginations of the US as a developed nation, having all good roads and footpaths took a diminishing path. For a moment it remembered me of the damaged roads and footpaths in India. I thought so it’s no different in US too. Then I continued with my sightseeing of different departments of northwestern university, of which I would write later. In the evening when I was coming back from office the footpath was in same damaged condition.

 

 

The second morning I took the same route to office as I didn’t want to get lost as I was still new in the city. But what I saw that day something very different, different in so many senses. I saw two young men taking some measurements around the yesterday’s damaged footpath. I know the damaged roads or footpaths are repaired in due time, in India too, though not always. But there was something really different in what I was seeing here. First of all the two young men who were working on the damaged footpath seemed to be well educated, may be some qualified civil engineers, as they were first taking measurements of the footpath so that they can do some planning on how this damage could be repaired. They had a van with them carrying all the modern equipments required by the civil engineers. Yesterday’s diminished path about the idea of US as a developed nation now started catching my mind again. If it had been India then there would have been a few unskilled labors working for such repairs if it had been repaired at all. Rarely do we see a qualified civil engineer supervising the works that the government authorities undertake. They are observed only on the sites of the large projects.

 

As I already mentioned both young men seemed to be qualified civil engineers to me and they didn’t have any third person working with them sp it was very clear that they were going to repair the footpath by their own hands, another rare seen on Indian land. May be we have excess of manpower and it’s affordable and convenient for government to have a few people working on such sites with pee-nuts of salaries given away. I agree with this practice of Indian authorities. But in that process we are loosing ground on two important nation building attributes, of which I would talk later in this article.

 

I didn’t take pain to actually talk to the two young men and went ahead towards office. When I was coming back from office I make it a point to take the same route as in the morning to see the repairing work that those two young men had done. I was very delighted to see that after the repairing done, the footpath was never look as it was damaged anytime. The repairing work that those two young men had done was so perfect that it didn’t left any mark of lack of skills on their part. And this is essentially what we lack in India. First the two young men didn’t feel any shame in repairing the footpath by their own hands, rather than just planning the repairing work and that resulted in a quality repairing work done by skillful hands. If this had been a case in some city in India then surely the repairs-men would have left thousands of signs behind to identify the repaired footpath even after years. This happens in any public constructions sites, be it a local road/footpath or a national highway. In today’s scenario, when everyone of talking of globalization and nation-states, infrastructure is given an extra point in achieving that state of so called truly global nation and we are missing on putting right efforts or adopting right attitude towards works of public interest. I call for civil engineers in India to do the work by their own hands but at least we can adapt a practice of having a qualified civil engineer supervising such works and stop the wrong practice of giving small works like repairing of roads to unqualified contractors, whom I have never seen doing some repairing work at least with some neatness in it that the vehicle drivers pains are reduced due to that repairing work. I always find it the other way, after some damaged road is repaired it becomes more painful to drive on such repaired roads.

The other thing, not applicable just to the public construction works but to any kind of government activity, is the devotion with which the two young men were working. They did the work as if it was a part of their house and a responsibility. Both these qualities are very important in the process of nation building. The progress in private sector is not going to make our nation a developed nation. That’s only going to create uneven distribution of wealth with very poor public facilities. We need same amount of efforts being taken in different government initiatives with these two qualities instilled in every person working for those activities, and then only would we be able to enjoy the status of being a developed nation in all its senses.