July 5, 1997. Millions of us are watching the telecast of the Wimbledon women's final on Doordarshan's main channel. Jana Novotna is serving at 4-5 in the final set. Deuce has been reached a few times. Novotna is finding it tough to stay in the championship, but Martina Hingis is not breezing through either. This is the stuff of which great drama is made.

The scene is as gripping as Hamlet's duel with Laertes. We have to be the most unfortunate people on earth, the Sindbads of the 20th century with Doordarshan around our necks like the Old Man of the Sea. Even as I take a couple of quick, tense bites at my nails, Wimbledon vanishes from the screen and on comes Tamil news. I switch to DD Metro. It's Tamil news there too.

I keep switching channels desparately. No dice. No tennis. I want to scream, I would like to wring the necks of the people in charge of DD, from the director-general to the local programme manager. But what's the use? DD has always done this and always will. Is Doordarshan full of sadists? It can't be, because Doordarshan is, like Camus' Universe, supremely indifferent to the emotional, mental and physical well-being of the people who watch its telecasts. No, it can only be because Doordarshan is supremely inefficient.

Just like any other Indian entity. If Doordarshan had not switched off the Wimbledon telecast, there would have been a power failure. Our SEB engineers are just as klutzy.

So is the private sector. Take an example. You buy something. It could be anything. A cricket bat for your son, a pressure cooker for your wife, a watch for your husband, a car, machinery worth Rs. 50 crores for your factory. If it is made in India, you can bet your Y-fronts that it will be defective or break down within a couple of weeks. Why? We are inefficient.We are a nation of righthanders with two left hands. This is what makes your son cry when the cricket bat breaks the first time he hits a cover drive on his birthday. It gives you high blood pressure when the new car does not start because of a blocked carburettor.

It gives you ulcers when you have to wait one hour at the bank to get a draft which could be readied in ten minutes. It makes your wife weep when the taps run dry just as the clothes are being washed. It is not as if we are utterly incapable of efficiency. For instance, the Indian diaspora is anything but klutzy. Indians living abroad are so good at their work that their efficiency is orders of magnitude higher than their fellow citizens in India. Perhaps this is because they do not have to deal with the bureaucracy in India! It is almost an axiom that a bureaucracy is incapable of doing a proper job of work. Our friends in the civil service in India appear to be just as bad as their counterparts elsewhere in the world. But our bureaucracy has shown that it is capable of functioning like clockwork when it is pushed by strong political will. Take a recent example.

The Tamil Nadu cabinet decided a few weeks back that districts and transport corporations in the State would no longer be named after politicians and leaders of communities and castes. The decision was taken in the evening. By the next morning, the old names were wiped out from all the transport corporation buses in Tamil Nadu and the new names painted.

This may seem to be a small thing but ask any bureaucrat and he will tell you that the logistics of the operation are rather complex. But the greatest demonstration of matchless efficiency occurred in the summer of 1974. The economy was in a shambles and the inflation rate had gone up to a dangerous 35 per cent or thereabouts. Indira Gandhi had to do something drastic and dramatic. One morning the nation woke up to the announcement that nearly 1,000 top smugglers all over the country had been arrested during the night. The biggest sharks were in the net; only a few minnows escaped. There was not a whisper about the operation and it was all done during a few hours in the night. The nationwide co-ordination was incredible.

Indira Gandhi of course used the crackdown on smugglers as the guide for the arrest on political leaders all over the country the night emergency was declared a year later. We can be pretty good; but unfortunately only in police operations.

Efficiency means the consumer gets products of top quality. Take cars, for instance. We put up with the shoddy stuff produced by Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles for decades; and these two companies are still making third-rate products.

Then came Maruti, which was the first demonstration that something made in India can be of high quality. But that is mainly because Suzuki is a partner. In fact, all the top drawer Indian-made products now available are made by joint ventures with foreign companies.

Perhaps the only way we can become efficient is by importing it!

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.