What would you say is India’s biggest problem, where biggest means all-pervasive? If you ask an economist he or she will say it’s the low investment level. That’s true.

If you ask a sociologist the answer will be caste. That’s also true. If you ask someone from the middle class, politics will be blamed. Again true.

A scientist will say it’s our inadequate scientific attitudes. True again. The bureaucracy will point to the sheer scale of governance issues. They too are right.

And so on. These are all valid reasons.

But there’s one problem that no one pays much attention to: incompetence. This problem is so huge and we are all so close to it that we can’t see it.

It doesn’t matter what profession we look at. The degree of incompetence is shocking.

My good friend and former colleague Sanjaya Baru once summed it up very nicely: our peak of competence is very high, but our average is very low.

So for all the successes of the Chandrayaan or the Mars mission or the Covid vaccine — or even the 107 medals in the Asian games — there are hundreds of millions acts of mind boggling incompetence.

It’s a national malaise which has not been recognised and, therefore, not been tackled purposefully. And there’s a reason for this: We simply don’t set the bar at a reasonably high level. Even our greatest achievements can be traced back to an act or acts of extraordinary incompetence.

Few know, for example, why the IITs became such islands of excellence. The reason is simple: a high entry barrier.

And therein lies a story of an accident caused by incompetence leading to the excellence of the IITs. It’s worth recalling it. It was told to me many years ago by a highly experienced and very senior professor of education.

The CBSE class 12 saga

The year was 1969. The Education Ministry had decided to find out how to standardise the new, upcoming Class 12 CBSE examination. So it asked all or most districts in India to conduct a test, the question paper for which it sent.

What happened next is fascinating. The principals of the schools that conducted the test asked their two very best students to take the test, instead of one best and one average and one poor student.

This mistake of asking the two best students introduced an upward bias in the difficulty level of the exam. And this, by the mid-1970s, resulted in too many children doing very well in the IIT entrance examination because that exam was still at the older higher secondary level.

By the end of the1970s, the IITs had decided to make the entrance test harder. So by the mid-1980s it was largely the BSc first year students who did well in the entrance test. This was also when the coaching institutes began to proliferate for the average kids in the 12th to help them out.

The ratcheting up stopped only around the mid-1990s. It wasn’t a policy. It was just plain old incompetence. The school principals of 1969 simply didn’t know what was required of them. Nor was the CBSE blameless. It failed to give the right instructions.

Fortunately for Bharat, the outcome was entirely favourable. It’s what’s called the law of unintended consequences.

Tackling incompetence

That’s why the biggest challenge is tackling incompetence at every level in every profession. It can’t be entirely eliminated, of course, but we can and must raise the average performance level to somewhere near, say, Swiss or German levels.

Because of political pressure from Bharat, we have given up on the two bedrocks of competence at work: recruitment standards and training standards. Ask anyone who employs people and they will all bemoan how we have let things slide. The latest example is the qualifying mark for certain entrance tests: zero!

As to training, perish the thought. Only the armed forces and the aviation industry take it seriously. In almost all other professions it’s there but mostly only in name. The private sector, too, is remiss in this regard but it’s nowhere near as bad as the government.

In fact, there aren’t any standards at all or rules or monitoring. Anyone can become anything from a doctor to a barber to a building contractor to anything.

The point of this rant is that in a capital scarce country, to get the biggest bang per buck, the workforce must be good, not just large to keep wages down. We have neglected this aspect almost completely.

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