There is plenty of talk about the current trends delivering India a demographic dividend. Economists like steady population growth to serve both as sizeable markets and as labour resources for economic activity. The sceptics warn that it will end up being a demographic deficit if we do not get our act together.

Taking a managerial perspective, our sizeable numbers provide us both an opportunity and a challenge. This is the skill of planning and managing a large scale of operations. The concept of scale economies; namely, the idea that with increased volume of activity costs per unit fall; only provides the most basic benefit. The idea of a learning curve, that as we learn over time to organise better and with higher volume can derive greater benefits, needs to be pursued more vigorously. Our record in this area is mixed.

In the public sphere, civil servants who handle the millions visiting the kumbhmela have earned the envy of observers. Yet, a stampede at Allahabad station in 2013 showed there were more lessons to be learned.

In the recent Chennai floods also, there were praises for how individuals and NGOs responded at a human level, although news channels regularly identified people who complained of poor relief efforts. The lessons learned during the tsunami relief seem to have been filed away.

It is not as though the private sector has learnt this any better. On a normal day, the ATM machines outside Delhi Haat (an artisanal market place) would work, but on a weekend, when the volume increases, invariably one breaks down. And the market loses business.

The success we see in the handling of large systems appears idiosyncratic. Individuals or specific organisations have learnt a thing or two, converted it into standard operating procedures, and stopped learning. A secondary learning of how we learned and identifying common principles for continuing the learning have not been examined. Thus it works most of the time, but any variation in the routine leads to uncertainty and risk of failure, and the learning is not generalisable.

Large volumes often come embedded in complex systems. They present unique features, the first of which is that they are multi-disciplinary. The nature of flow and the repercussions of constriction apply equally to traffic getting past a construction site and to pilgrims rushing for their darshan at a temple through a narrow path. Thus, the principles of systems analysis need to be drawn in.

Operating efficiently will require drawing insights from several disciplines. People come in waves to the immigration counter at large airports. Assuming the system has goals of efficiency (say, number of people serviced per hour) and effectiveness (say, high satisfaction rating), several functional areas come into play: the size of the waiting area, people to direct customers in the right lanes, preparing them beforehand so the time spent at the point of service is short, coordination between multiple service providers, delegation of authority to low levels to vary the number of service points in operation, flexible reward mechanisms for the employees, and so on.

Educational institutions need to take up this challenge and devise courses that will specifically build the skills of handling large numbers. India’s volumes present ideal conditions in which to specialise in this discipline.

The writer is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, and Jindal Global Business School

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