Productivity more about boosting efficiency

Chalta hai! Or rather, unproductive and incompetent! These were the words that came to mind on knowing about the embarrassment that visited the high-powered India Mobile Congress 2021 recently. Those present included Mukesh Ambani, Sunil Bharti Mittal and Kumar Mangalam Birla, the ones on whose shoulders rests the burden of providing India with mobile and data connectivity.

The Prime Minister’s pre-recorded speech was delayed by 30 minutes. The speech of the Union Telecommunications Secretary was abruptly cut off after a few minutes. Matters did not end here. The speech of the Junior Telecom Minister was relayed without any introduction. Fortunately, the rebuke that Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister, contributed to the Indian Mobile Congress 2021, got carried in full. Ironically, the theme of the conclave was ‘Connectivity for the next decade’.

Come to think of it, inefficiency and low quality characterise a very large number of sectors in India today. Workers, peasants and everyone else whilst working in India are identified with extremely low productivity. Chalta hai is a phrase which effectively summarises our attitude to everything.

Till date, India progressed mostly by default, not by design. Even the liberation of the economy that happened in the 1990s merely allowed the economic slack to be taken up. We got so impressed with the sudden jump that we started to use the word ‘reform’ for the mere removal of the death grip of the state.

From this follows the misconception so dear to India’s economists and policy-makers, that for the economy to move forward, more of the regulatory structure needs to be dismantled and the reforms need to go further. That is neither here nor there because going by the experience of the telecommunications conclave or India’s persistent inability to deal with air pollution, the problem is not so much in regulations, but in their absence. The problem is compounded by the creation of regulations that are created without any application of the mind. The fact is that no modern economy can function without adequate regulatory controls.

Much like the good Taliban and the bad Taliban, there are good

regulations and bad regulations; you may not want them, you may not love them, but you just have

to adjust to them. The need for India is to shun bad regulations and adopt good regulations.

However, the embarrassing experience of the mobility conclave has one more lesson for us. And that is about creating quality products and providing services that have some value. Valueless services are much like the housework that a housewife does. It happens. It cannot be avoided. Someone of very low worth does it. Once in a while, it is appreciated, but by and large, the users remain indifferent to services provided; the service provider remains indifferent to the outcomes.

Indians must get used to providing and demanding a high quality of service. India’s wealth insofar as the wealth is visible today, isn’t the consequence of creating more value but merely picking up the slack which had existed in the economy for many decades. Even the current upswing in tax revenue that we are seeing is the result of the businesses that had hitherto remained out of the net being integrated with the formal economy. It is not a result of significant increases in output.

To create a country which draws respect in the world, what we really need are massive increases in productivity in every sector. That, however, is a thing which is almost entirely missing in India, in almost every endeavour in which Indians are involved.

In India, we have great difficulty even in understanding what productivity is. A common mistake is to confuse jugaad and a mere increase in production with productivity. Chalta hai remains a common enough phrase in every area of life. Far from being associated with ‘simple living and high thinking’, Chalta hai merely ensures that we are forced to make greater adjustment to low-quality living with low-quality services. Such low-quality living is not likely to foster any high thinking.

Productivity implies that given the same resources, there is an increase in the value of the outputs produced. Productivity is as much a state of mind as it is of having resources and the knowledge to improve one’s efficiencies. For example, when a table is being prepared in Microsoft Word, the simple command to repeat the header row means that the users of the table do not have to wrack their brains on what the rows below mean. Yet, time after time, one notices the absence of this small productivity enhancing trick.

You don’t need to undergo a course in Harvard or in an IIM or even be trained in an IIT to do well, and more efficiently, whatever work has been assigned to you. The look of grievous hurt that one sees on the face of the electrician who is reminded that he forgot to set up the earth connection is at odds with the ‘bookish’ knowledge that every electrical equipment needs to be made safe with proper earthing. Those ubiquitous open covers of switch boxes which adorn almost every street in every town of India, exposing dangerous electrical connections to the elements and enabling them to kill people, are part of the problem. Unfortunately, whatever be the sector, Chalta hai is taken for granted.

No great capital resources are needed to bring about the necessary changes. What is needed is a sense that outcomes matter, that a job, irrespective of what it is, needs to be done well. Our indifference to the consequences of our actions or inactions needs to end.

Outcomes matter in everything we do. Increasing productivity is about improving outcomes. It is about creating value. Without a mindset change, investing more capital would achieve little. Sab kuchh nahin chalta hai!