Unees Bees - Revisited

The first time I played this number* was in March 2023, prompted by press reports that the venerable House of Tatas had a failure rate of 50% on the housings they were making for Apple phones. 

That, as my friend Prasanna Srinivasan predicted, probably worked itself out, as failure costs money, and export markets demand global standards. But the news item caused me to recall a Hindi phrase we used a lot when I was younger, ‘unees-bees’. Literally ‘nineteen-twenty’, it was typically used to convey that the difference was not really worth fretting about, and if you insisted on precision, you were being unreasonable.

The Tatas had to train their workforce out of our attitude of ‘nineteen-twenty’ - our widespread acceptance of imprecision - if their work for Apple were to survive. For the bulk of our nation, though, the attitude is well and thriving, and I’m replaying this song because of the second part of what Prasanna commented last March:

Tragically, this ‘unees-bees’ attitude extends to matters of safety - electrical wiring, fire hazards, personal safety, road safety and so on.

This season, six Delhi residents were electrocuted by naked electric wires that sent shocks through rain waters that had failed to drain. This was ‘nineteen-twenty’ to the power of two:  it required drains that didn’t quite drain, along with electrical cables that weren’t quite insulated. In comparison, my own home was flooded by a single mathematical failure - the inability to slope a road in the direction of a drain. 

I looked up some papers on road-building, which, though not exactly a recent technology, requires more exactitude than the five percent difference between nineteen and twenty. A road surfaced with asphalt requires only a 2% slope to drain the water. Change that by 5%, and the road could end up sloping 3% in the wrong direction - in this case, instead of channelling water into the storm water drains along the Outer Ring Road, it sent surges of rainwater into the Satyanand home. There was also the small matter of cascades running through the offices of the Rajya Sabha, part of the brand new Parliament building, whose construction was personally supervised by our Prime Minister:

Another mistake of the ‘nineteen-twenty’ kind caused the entrance canopy of a Delhi airport building to crash, killing a cab driver and shutting one terminal for six weeks. The difference between nineteen and twenty is not just five percent. It takes its measure in human lives. 

Pranay Kotasthane, the policy maven, had also responded to my piece last year. Like Prasanna, he was quite sanguine about our path to better product quality:

Japan and China did a few years of ‘Unees-Bees’ before becoming manufacturing powerhouses. Linkages to exports were key perhaps. Their prosperous consumers were more demanding.

Incentives matter, and the need to retain and attract customers will lead businesses to precision, or extinction. But the incentives to more precise design and execution of our infrastructure are far from clear. Heads don’t roll, resignations are not demanded, and ministers under attack from the opposition fulminate about how hard they work from the floor of the parliament. Meanwhile, the machinery of government rolls, or derails, along. Nothing changes.

There is a deep cultural malaise here. When our house was threatened by undrained waters for a second time this monsoon, I let the colony Whatsapp group know that all was not well. One resident responded:

You do know that Toronto was hit by a thunderstorm recently, and roads got flooded, electricity was down for 9 hours, etc.

I don’t know whether that was supposed to make me feel better, but I can report that it did exactly the opposite. Municipal and government services have no incentives to use the tools of engineering and the slide-rules of exactitude, unless we demand this of them. 

Explaining away disasters from a mistaken sense of jingoism is quite the opposite of patriotism. It imperils our future, both economic and existential. The twenty-first century demands that we jettison ‘nineteen-twenty’.

1. The earlier piece was posted on Gimme Mo on March 26, 2023

   https://mohitsatyanand.substack.com/p/india-19-20