India Going Full Steam Ahead

The Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi is giving what people were all the time desirous of.  He has given so many mantra’s and people are lapping it up happily.  He is showing the people of India that there is hope.  There is hope for a better life, hope for a good environment to live in, hope for prosperity and economic progress.  People are fed up of living within financial constraints.  The world has become aspirational about India and what I can do it it explores and nurtures it own potential, its demographic dividend, its natural resources and putting to good use the educational institutions and institutes of higher learning.  While the India’s rich have aspirations to conquer and dominate the world stage, the poor want to do more than just survive.  They want to have a share of the prosperity and rightfully so.

The Prime Minister’s mantras are not new but their coinage is effective.  It throws a spell and people are falling in awe.  But if you take a deep look, they have a lot of meaning attached to it.  Speed, Skill and Scale was one which describes the way India should go ahead if it has to, forget the outer world and become and economic superpower, help India’s population to prosper internally.  Even if they do business internally within India with this mission, they will achieve great heights.  This mission statement has lot of deeper meaning to it because we have now got very used to the “Chalta hai” (it’s okay, who cares) kind of attitude.  

The “Chalta hai”, attitude indicates that: 

1. It’s okay, we will do it at our own pace. The deadline given to customer is not important.
2. It's okay to compromise on the materials than that shown or assured to the client; 
3. It's okay to compromise on the quality, fit and finish. A cover up job will hide the defects and customer will not come to know about it;
4. It's okay to compromise on the workmanship. (there are too many customers and we have to expedite delivery.)  We will never hire the required manpower to complete the job and therefore, the final product will not be anywhere close to the original or sample that was shown to the client, based on which the order was received.
5. It's okay to do some additional cheating - you go back on the agreed terms.  If delivery was promised, you refute the terms and tell the customer that he has to collect the delivery from the workshop or the factory.

The basic premises is that the customer will never know what we have not given him and since he is in dire need of the product, he will not have time to return the product or goods and therefore, we do not have to worry about anything.  Also, if the customer if very keen on adherence to the terms, we do not expect him to to be our repeat customer in any case because we don't want such troublesome customer, so any poor quality product or service will do, and so on.  

This "Chalta Hai" attitude has to change first and foremost, and has to change fast.  If not, it will affect our image at the global level.  It already has created a negative impact and Indian's are considered as no compromising on quality, fit and finish. 

 

The other impact will be that people will seek products from foreign countries which will discourage domestic production and lead to outflow of valuable foreign currency.  Indians have earlier been crazy about Japanese, British and American products.  Then for a brief period we saw a demand for Indian products rise and now worldwide, Chinese products have conquered the market.  Name the product and you will see a Chinese product.  The consequences of low share of domestic production has domino effect are many and countries like the USA and some other western countries and seeing the consequences of having low local manufacturing industry.

Combined with the “Make in India” Mantra, the “Speed, Skill and Scale” concept have the potential to take India to the next level in terms of its own economic progress.  The market in India is huge and products that are manufactured in India will be consumed here itself.  So finding a market for products and consumption is not an issue at all.  

Manufacturing has to pick up and for that to happen, the government must ease the norms for doing business.  In the coming days, it would be interesting to see how the plans unfold.  Much has been said about what should be done and what has not been done.  But now is the time for the government machinery to work together, iron out the differences, work in synergy with each other.  The Prime Minister must ensure that the Speed, Scale and Skill mantra must start from the government departments first.  The scale is there in terms of the huge number of employees (here we will not question their performance), the format and structure is there.  They need to deliver things with SPEED.  How the Prime Minister brings in accountability of the government agencies will be interesting to see.  The PM and his office may have control over the Central Government ministries and they may be able to drive it in mission mode, but when it comes to the machinery at the State and Municipal level, it may collapse completely.

I am left wondering as to why previous governments could not think of all these simple aspects all the while they were in office. India could have achieved so much progress by now.  These kind of confidence building activities do not require legislative procedures and the opposition would have been easily floored.  

This gives rise to another aspect about application of creativity in political field has become very important.  Creativity was the domain of artists in the field of fine arts, advertising and related fields of mass communication.  The Prime Minister has shown that just by being creative, so much can be dreamt of first and then achieved.  There is positivity in the environment, stock market is bullish, globally oil prices are on the decline, whole price index and inflation seem to be steadying or maintaining ground, people are talking about it and there is positive energy flowing all around.  

Although so far nothing on the ground level has changed yet but people are hoping that it will, very soon.

Indians are looking up with hope for a better tomorrow.


Sarfaraz Lakhani
Calibre Creators
www.calibrecreators.com