14 July 2009

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad country.

Cranes topple at the Metro mishap site in New Delhi.

What is funny is that these cranes were pressed into service to pull a
girder out, after yesterday's collapse. Now these cranes, in plain
sight, on TV, were pulled up by the weight of the girder and thrown up
like toys. Apparently, one of them landed on a nearby building and
damaged it.

Clearly rank incompetence is at play here, and this is no accident either.

An accident is what happens when a completely unexpected set of events
take place that we cannot plan for. The strength of the pillar (P67)
was not tested by a meteor hitting it. It gave way under the weight
of the girder it was supposed to carry, upon which the rails would be
laid for the Metro to ply.

If the pillar wasn't strong enough to carry the load of the girder on
top, some engineer somewhere doesn't know how to calculate this simple
number. Or, s/he doesn't know how to design a pillar that can
withstand a cantilever load. This is nothing but incompetence.

India produces hundreds of thousands of "engineers" every year. Just
visit any engineering college and look at the "projects" that students
do as part of their academic curriculum. Usually, many of them get
away with copying other such "projects" from other universities,
because with all the e-governance and connectivity and modernization,
it is impossible to keep track of how the same project can be done in
a hundred different universities and lead to a thousand different
graduates!

None of our engineers are capable of solving problems outside their
books. Building a metro railway system is not experimental in any
way, and none of the technologies needed there are beyond normal
engineering capabilities of any country in the world. So, why are we
putting up a flop show?

Because our engineers are no good. I have been witness to third year
engineering students not knowing which meter indicates suction
pressure and which indicates delivery pressure in a simple water
pumping system. And this is in a well known engineering college!
Everybody got their calculations wrong and efficiency figures
competely haywire, while it took the lecturer, (another theoretical
genius) all of forty five minutes to figure out what was going wrong.
It is ridiculous how bad these fools are.

Since the invention of the aeroplane, over 90% of the world's patents
are held by citizens of the USA. The writing is on the wall - that is
where the innovations are happening. India, with three times the
population of the USA, with the most number of universities in the
world, and 16% of the world's population, doesn't hold even 2% of the
world's patents. Bottomline - we do not innovate. We do not
encourage originality and we are clueless when it comes to applying
our "knowledge" to solve our own problems. Why would we call foreign
experts to clean up the Ganges otherwise?

We produce engineering students, we produce people with paper degrees
in engineering. But we do not produce engineers. We merely produce
people who have studied some engineering texts but have no idea how
and where to apply any of what they studied. We would not have sheer
incompetence in the simplest of matters of civil engineering if we
produced real engineers. Oh, sure the IITs do a fantastic job,
feeding other countries with our few real engineers.

It is a completely different matter that companies winning contracts
on projects often hand it over to other companies. It finally comes
down to an engineering company doing its job. And ours just don't cut
it.

India hasn't updated its construction standards since pre-independence
times. Other countries have gone through several updates, and
continue to update their standards atleast once every year. So, the
arrival of new materials, techniques and technologies are being denied
to us for one simple reason - incompetence. We do not know how to use
any of the new advancements, because our "standards" are stuck in the
1940s!

Call any leading contractor doing a job for the government. Nothing
complicated, just someone laying roads. Ask him what the standard
curvature and height for a speedbreaker is. He won't know. He
wouldn't even have heard of any such thing as a "standard". Who cares
if your car scrapes on the hump when you are getting humped in so many
different ways? This is India. Jai Ho!

- BSK

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