Topic started by Rohit (@ webcachem05b.cache.pol.co.uk) on Fri Feb 14 19:00:00 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.
The word quality recapitulates rank, condition, merit, calibre, worth or grade of an item, article, object, commodity, substance, piece or something that are manifestations or creations of human intellect and efforts. In fact, these items are there for people to make a sensible judgement about how bad or good the quality of those items is. The quantifying scale of quality ranges from the worst, worse, bad, inferior, good, better and the best or excellent and its perception subjectively changes depending on who is making the judgement. Most people in India are generally good at making a sensible judgement on quality when they are at the receiving or demanding end and provided there are concrete choices available to them. But most of them fail miserably in assessing the quality of the products and services when there is a limited or no choice and also when their own work is the subject of quality assessment. They not only unwarily keep accepting/receiving inferior quality of work, products and services from others but also keep rendering inferior quality of work, products or services to others. Explanation for this peculiar behaviour seems to lie in the weakly understood concept of quality itself by the people, which, to a large extent, hinders their ability to make right and independent judgement of the quality and in turn, it prevents people from demanding and rendering improved products and services. In other words, there seems to be a serious lack of conceptual grasp in the Indian psyche in general, which also prevents the development of aptitude for innovation and creativity in the Indian society.
For example, Indian export market is not growing in value at the same rate as the rate of total quantity of goods exported. The obvious reason is the poor quality of Indian products; no one in the international market wants to buy poor quality Indian products if the prices are not kept low enough. To make the Indian products competitive (higher quality/price ratio), the Indian government have to keep devaluing Rupee in the international exchange market to facilitate more export of Indian products. But this doesn’t seem to pay off; though the quantity of exported goods increases, the net returns earned do not increase at the same rate. The obvious solution is to improve the quality of Indian products and increase the quality/price ratio that is sellable in the global market, but that is not conceivable either as the Indian manufacturers have even greater difficulty in improving the quality of their products to an internationally acceptable standards. On the contrary, Indian people have shown a far better appreciation for foreign designed products; imported or locally produced by the foreign companies, and they pay much higher prices, but somehow they find it extremely difficult to match the quality and compete against those foreign designed products. Now this does suggest something very alarming, why can’t the Indian producers render the expected quality?
India is badly loosing the manufacturing sector to China, which has shown considerable improvement in the quality of their manufactured items; more and more Chinese products are being sold in the global markets with lesser complaints about the quality. More and more Chinese products are increasingly becoming trustworthy in terms of their quality, while the products labelled “Made in India” repel people from buying them. Large fraction of Indian items gets rejected during quality checks and they end up either in bins or given almost free to market traders. Most dealers are compelled to remove “Made in India” label and they sell only screened Indian products to High street shops at much higher prices to cover the cost of rejects and their profit, while Indian suppliers have to sell these products in large quantities at much reduced prices due to quality problems. Ironically, even when the Indian suppliers are complained/explained to improve their quality standards, nothing changes next time round, the foreign buyer has no choice but to give-up but asks for reduction in price to make the trade deal.
Similarly, when there is a issue concerning the quality of Governance, Administration, Education, Management, Employment etc. people have lots of complaints, but they struggle to figure out what to demand in order to improve the quality of those services. The majority of people seem to have no idea about the overall deficiency in the system and they are totally oblivious about what to expect from the people providing and managing them; and the people who render the services are no better in their own assessments either.
Now, let us see India’s world ranking in several other areas:
Though, being a large country, Indian GDP ranks 13th in the world, its HDI ranking is 124th and its GDP/Capita ranking is 129th. India ranks 68th in the list of least corrupt countries of the world.
The situation is no different when it comes to judging the quality of:
Analysis
Art
Communication
Entertainment
Environment
Healthcare
Information
Journalism
Judgement
Language
Legal System
Life
Media Presentation
Music
Observation
Personal Conduct
Political System
Public Presentation
Research
Social System
Thinking ……………….and hosts of other!
Despite the obvious and discernible deficiencies, most people in India seem to have little or no idea/knowledge about the urgent need for significant quality improvement in the most areas; and it is irrelevant whether the people are at the receiving end or at the rendering end!
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