Where are the SOPs?

Any large, well-run organisation has standard operating procedures (SOPs), so that people know what is to be done in any one of several routine (and some non-routine) situations. It will also have the systems to make sure that SOPs are being followed. But the government, which is the mother of all organisations when it comes to size and complexity, gives the impression of having no SOPs outside of places like the military, which would simply collapse without SOPs.

The result is there for all to see. Flyovers get built at busy road junctions without the traffic police being asked about utility, direction and specific requirements depending on the traffic pattern; at one clover-leaf mega-flyover in Delhi, the approved designs were changed at construction stage, causing permanent pedestrian harassment and routine water-logging. Or, one department digs up the sidewalk on a road to lay cables, only for another department to come along and dig it up a few months later for its own purpose. So our cities look like permanent worksites — New Delhi's showpiece Rajiv Chowk is an unholy mess many months after the metro project has finished work on its central traffic hub underneath. And it doesn't help that escalators from the station below bring you up right in the middle of a parking lot, with the protrusion rendering half the parking lot unserviceable.

Or take traffic signals, which even 30 years ago used to be co-ordinated so that you did not get more than one red light if you drove at a specified speed along a road with many intersections. Not any more — so traffic backs up as you run into one red light after another. Even the visual effect of a planned city that New Delhi used to convey (a standard design for road signs, a common grill pattern for the fencing of parks, etc.) has given way to riotous ingenuity — you have different grills for the same park on two sides of a road, kerbs that are made of stone in some cases and concrete in others (with differing heights, naturally), and road signs that are blue in some places, yellow in others, and white in yet others, so that none can be spotted easily as familiar landmarks.

These are simple, everyday examples which tell us that SOPs either don't exist or are defective or routinely ignored. The problem surfaces in more complex exercises as well -- like designing contracts for building highways, or inviting bids for a power project. Each time the work will start ab initio, as though nothing has been done in this area before. Defective contracts and mid-course changes to poorly-thought-out design mean that disputes and delays become endless -- as with the stranded Bandra-Worli sea-link in Mumbai and the still-incomplete Delhi-Gurgaon expressway.

It is not that people are not aware of the problem. With large projects involving public-private partnership multiplying by the day (toll roads, airport modernisation, railway container services and hospitals), a team in the Planning Commission has expended a lot of time and effort in drawing up standard bidding and contract documents that can be used. These have made a difference in some cases (like private container services on the railways), and should have done so in others as well, except that someone in a ministry concerned will not rest until he has fiddled with the document and introduced changes. End of standardisation, quick selection processes and speedy execution.

If one thinks about it, the task is not a mammoth one. Perhaps no more than 100 well-thought-out SOPs for all civic bodies, if religiously followed, would transform our cities. But the philosophically-inclined will say that Indians are naturally inventive, so they will not stick to a given groove; even in Indian classical music, after all, there is no concept of harmony, the emphasis being on individual virtuosity. As Sunil Sethi wrote on this page a month ago, Babur too dreamt of turning "disorderly Hindustan" into a garden where "in every border rose and narcissus are in perfect arrangement". He failed, of course. Is it possible for us to succeed, 500 years later?