The Hindu Business Line : When control systems don't work well

You are never too young nor too old for a bite of the yummy, a chocolate ad proudly proclaimed some time ago . But as the ad copy itself pointed out rather significantly, timing can be a source of acute dilemma in most other things.

Take the predicament of the average traveller on any of these late afternoon flights, which are always cases of too early for supper, but too late for lunch. And so it was for this writer, while on an Alliance Air flight from Kolkata to Chennai. The scheduled time of departure at 2.30 in the afternoon is that time of the day when all that you get by way of in-flight refreshment is the aviation equivalent of what rural India would derisively label as just chai-biskoot. If you make allowances for the Kolkata traffic (there is only so much that new flyovers dotting the landscape can do to ease the traffic pressure caused by a burgeoning population) it means an early start from the hotel.

The restaurant at the airport too isn't of much help. In time, it may sport a chic look both in décor and a choice of a la carte. But for now, the restaurant doesn't offer much by way of choice. I mean, after your eyes have feasted on the oily samosa to rest on the cream cake, you have run out of meal options.

So a packed lunch from the hotel seemed the best bet. But I had reckoned without the over zealousness of jawans of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) manning the airport security. I had dumped my luggage and the lunch hamper on the X-ray machine's conveyor wondering at the odds of being able to retrieve it after the security had done with frisking me for hidden weapons. As it happened, the lunch packet had gone missing when I looked for it after hurriedly peeling myself away from the long line of people waiting to be frisked. I searched around, rather anxiously, to see if someone had picked it up by accident. No such luck. But soon, an argument broke out between a lady by my side and a CISF jawan. The lady was angrily gesticulating to the CISF jawan on duty to hand over to her the handbag lying at the bottom of the sloping conveyor of the screening machine. But the jawan stoutly refused saying it didn't have a baggage tag on which he could affix the security stamp. There to my joy and relief stood, amidst an assortment of lady's handbags, vanity kits, gentlemen's pouches and such other pieces of luggage, which passengers somehow thought didn't quite amount to hand luggage and hence didn't bother to tag , my lunch hamper. I piped in with the request to the CISF jawan if he would be pleased to hand it over pretending to be completely oblivious of the commotion that was going on in front of my eyes. He responded haughtily that the requirement of a baggage tag applied to lunch hampers as well. Thinking that humour would succeed where appeal to common sense didn't, I pleaded that there may be no lunch hamper worth speaking of in the next ten minutes as its contents would have disappeared inside my stomach by then. The jawan was blessed with an equal if somewhat black sense of humour. He said whether I ate my lunch at the departure gate or threw it out of the aircraft window in mid-air, it was all the same to him. Minus a tag, the hamper wouldn't leave his custody, he seemed to imply.

By now, a crowd of irate passengers had gathered around him all with identical complaints. But eventually order was restored when an Alliance Air staff materialised out of nowhere with a bunch of baggage tags and distributed them to passengers needing one .

A happy ending you might say. Not certainly for the CISF jawan. Not so much, I reckon, that a lunch packet which he could have passed on to a senior in charge of airport security and scored a few brownie points that are so useful at the time of annual appraisal, as to the fact that a vital element of the airport security system was being compromised in this manner. Can't blame him. I am sure, nobody bothered to tell him that the act of stamping a baggage tag was not an end in itself, but only a means to an end. In the instant case, it is a device by which the airport security staff communicate with the airline traffic staff guarding the gate so that they can be assured that a piece of hand luggage that a passenger is carrying is free of any contraband . It would have been impossible for the security staff to convey on an individual basis whose baggage had been checked and whose hasn't been. Viewed thus, it should have mattered little to him whether my lunch hamper carried a security stamp or not. Without it, the packet doesn't get on board the aircraft, assuming I was going to carry it on and not consume it while waiting. In other words, in the CISF jawan's scheme of things, the act of affixing a stamp has acquired an identity all of its own instead of being seen as an element in a larger control system on airport security.

But that is the way with all management control systems. Somewhere along the way, individual components of a system, in a manner of speaking, break away from the whole. From here, it is but a small step for people responsible for operating that leg of a larger composite system, to view it not as an element in that larger system, but one that has an identity of its own and whose purpose they may not be able to fathom but must nevertheless believe that they must implement without any deviation.

Why does this happen? Clearly, there is a problem of lack of communication between the designer of a system and those responsible for its operation. If he doesn't communicate to those responsible for operating the system what role each component part plays in the larger scheme of things, it is inevitable that those down the line start to view individual components of a system as having an identity of its own. True, they may not perceive the bigger picture. That may be bad enough. But what would be worse is when they start to think that it is yet another instance of how those at the top have taken leave of their senses a long time ago and hence make the staff do meaningless things!