In Kishore Biyani's book "It Happened In India", there is one story where Biyani and an associate are not able to find the onramp to the Mumbai Pune expressway. Frustrated, Biyani complains to his associate, who is an NID (National Institute of Design, the premier design school in the country) graduate designer that after 30 years of NID, the school and its graduates still haven't made any impact in the country. The associate defends NID rather weakly citing the designing of the SBI logo Indian Airlines logo and some such examples. Bhiyani segues the story towards his own ideas about the importance of design in the retailing work that he does, on India-centric design and some other things. (That associate by the way is persuaded to merge his design firm with another complementary one, to create Idiom design, Bangalore, a firm Biyani feels has the potential to become one of the best design shops in the world).
My own take on the story is that it is very revealing of one thing: the fact that the NID people are happy to contribute by designing logos when the whole country is one vast landscape that could do with design inputs at every level (designing of policies, railway stations and buses, traffic systems, cities, you name it). A similiar criticism applies to the IITs, I think. In some form this criticism has been around for a long time, perhaps from the time I graduated, but I'd like to add my take to it, from personal experience. Of late, I'm continually struck, how everywhere you look in India there is something that a good engineer could improve. From my own work in water, water quality, rainwater harvesting systems, hydrogeology and groundwater, appropriate wastewater treatment systems are examples. Other examples: traffic engineering, rural development, agricultural engineering, IT-enabling government and development. We have built infinite number of buildings especially in the last twenty years, but have any signficant construction innovations happened ? Why is it that the entire country has the same cookie-cutter style apartment buildings ? Is there any significant improvement in building technology that we have come up with by observing Indian conditions and innovating for them ? Travelling in rural areas, I see how bad the roads are ; the reason being there is not enough money to build and repave. Why have we not found a more appropriate version of the conventional way of building a road, that may not be as comfortable but will atleast connect all the villages in a minimally motorable fashion? Somehow the IITs and other engineering colleges have managed to divorce themselves from all that and find some strange projects to do and sustain themselves. Its a great pity because, from personal experience, the stimulation of working on things that are directly relevant to people lives is huge, and the work is incredibly rewarding.
Kishore Biyani's experience of creating and managing Pantaloons, Big Bazaar and more, which is recounted in the book is also relevant to the above. While I have personally been quite revolted by Big Bazaar (I'll have to go back and try again), the book makes me see it in a different light. What Kishore Biyani says he's trying to do (and I believe him) is bring the 'retail experience' to an order of magnitude more people than previously could access it. And you gotta agree with anybody trying to bring any sort of benefits (even a dubious one like consumerism) to a much larger audience. In India so many things are restricted at the 1% or 10% level of the population, and we have gotten used to it and gotten complacent. Anything that breaks that barrier and equalizes stuff with the rest of the country has to be, in the big picture, a good thing. The Nano is another example.
Image from Rupa Publications website, Go there
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