The Duke and the fusebox

Because you do not trust the voltage, you buy stabilisers for every gadget worth anything — air conditioners, television sets, refrigerators and microwaves. Because even a stabiliser is not safe enough for a mo-re expensive computer, you buy a UPS instead. Because you are not sure you will have power most of the time, you buy an invertor or, if you have understanding neighbours and landlords who do not complain too much about noise and fumes, a power generator. Either way it adds a fair bit to the final price tag for the gadget and never mind what it does to our household aesthetics. How many light bulbs do you buy every month? Nowhere in the civilised world — where the consumer is taken seriously — do light bulbs figure in anybody’s monthly grocery shopping list. The world is now moving into the more expensive energy saving bulbs that consume almost a fifth of the power your 100-watt bulb burns. But can you afford that whenit is enormously more sensitive to our power fluctuations?

Don’t all of us have, as vindication for the Duke, cupboards stacked with burnt-out juicers, toasters, ovens, hair dryers, cordless phones? Fused bulbs have become such a significant part of our economy that Liberty, a leading shoe manufacturer, has even launched a scheme offering free shoes in exchange for a certain number of bulbs which must be quite large given the insignificant price your kabaadiwallah gives you for these. If there is anything about the Duke’s statement that surprises me, it is that how come he came to figure out such a well-kept secret of Indian life? Why, when the very same Indians who churn out such shoddy products within their own country, usually do top quality work abroad?

Several years ago, one of the pink papers carried an interesting piece on what the writer called “broken window” economics. Simply put, it means that someone breaks your window so you replace the windowpane. Then someone breaks your windowagain, you replace it again, and so on. It is precisely this that the poor quality of our goods and services has condemned us to. Buying transformers, invertors and generators because we get electricity of lousy quality is broken window economics. But just because Prince Philip has spoken about Indian-standard fuseboxes, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that this broken window economics syndrome is confined to our electricity supply and fittings.

We consume many more tyres per thousand kilometres of driving because of the quality of our roads. Because the public sector telephone instruments supplied by the DoT are so lousy, we buy our own Panasonics and Sonys. The faucets in our bathrooms, the flush handles and cistern assemblies? Best to haul them in on one of your future foreign trips, or I will tell you the shops, at least in Delhi, that will either sell you imported stuff, or something built by a foreign joint venture. Ever wonder why we make such terrible toothbrushes? Door stoppers that won’tstop anything till you break your toe kicking into the door that keeps swinging back at you?

The Duke of Edinburgh may be a man the world loves to laugh at. But the quality of our manufacturing has bewildered people worldwide though we, as consumers, have somehow taken it all lying down. Or maybe, rather than complain, we find it easier to acquire foreign goods than demand quality at home. In one of the publicity packages sent out by the Japanese Embassy in New Delhi I found a copy of the Japan Economic Report, January-March 1999, which contained an article by Isao Imagawa, former head of Denso India Ltd.

The Indian manufacturing industry, barring a few exceptions, is by and large sick, he said, and blamed it on three reasons, besides the usual infrastructural and bureaucratic bottlenecks: Extremely low productivity, inferior quality of goods and lack of will to improve quality and low technical competence. He then goes on to complain about voltage fluctuations and fuseboxes playing havoc with computersand sensitive equipment and how correctives jack up costs. To add insult to injury, he adds: “Interestingly, most of the machines made in India are not fully equipped to cope with India’s power situation… We cannot use Indian machinery for important processes… We can do so if we do not bother about quality.” Before anyone now starts accusing the Japanese Embassy of spreading disinformation, I might as well mention that the article was based on a speech delivered at the 29th Indo-Japan Joint Business Committee meeting at New Delhi.

Imagawa is only underlining what we see in our daily lives. Poor quality of manufacturing and services becomes a murderous vicious cycle. What is worse, we, as consumers, tend to be probably the most docile in the world. We are happy to live with Ambassador cars, wait in year-long queues for Premier Padminis in the name of Made in India. We do not even ask how come the basic quality of trucks and buses on our roads has remained more or less static for more than four decades.We fret and fume within the confines of our households as nationalised banks mess up our accounts, treat us rudely when we go to cash a cheque, when Air India loses our bookings, but do not complain as consumers. We are still fooled by slogans of extreme, self-serving protectionism dished out in the name of self-reliance by businessmen who have made fortunes by treating us as racoons imprisoned in a protectionist cage. It is only when our minds are controlled by such warped nationalistic consumerism that Maruti (read Suzuki) dares to fool us by offering us a Zen Classic by merely replacing the old front grille with a chrome-plated one, never mind the car still works on a carburetted engine while the world moved on to fuel injection years ago. It is only because of this that Indian Air Force pilots keep dying in MiGs manufactured to HAL’s high (!) quality standards. Please forget this cockeyed nationalism for a moment, think like a consumer and the Duke of Edinburgh may sound like he is talking sense, foronce.