It's all about finishing

Who does not remember the story of the race between the hare and the tortoise? The hare raced ahead, confident of finishing in a jiffy. He paused at a belt shop for a quick beer, became groggy and went to sleep at the nearby bus stop and never finished the race.
Our unfinished lives
Indians have a great history of building impeccable monuments with intricate detailing work and therefore assume that we always had a penchant for meticulous quality construction.But since then we have declined in the implementation and finishing department. The tendency to leave things incomplete is evident everywhere. Piles of rubble and unused building material lie around outside buildings. Inside wires dangle awkwardly, switch boards are misaligned, bathrooms have white cement and putty smeared everywhere, drains are clogged, wood varnish is smeared on the painted walls and wall paint smeared on the woodwork.
Unfinished roads
Take public works. Roads are dug to run a water or sewerage pipe and the road is never re-surfaced again. Holes are made to repair water pipelines and the rubble is simply pushed back into the hole to form a mound on top. You would expect that the hole would be surfaced with bitumen or cement. Despite having a refinery in Vizag that produces bitumen, GVMC has a perpetual shortage of the stuff to finish repair works. Interestingly, the classic explanation the municipal workers give for leaving mounds of rubble on re-filled holes is that it takes a few days for our vehicles to run over the mound and compact it adequately. They imply that it is the duty of every road user to drive over these mounds over and over again till it is fully compacted.
Pole position
How does our electrical utility company APEPDCL fare on the finishing line? Not too well. The covers of almost every electrical junction box in the city hang open exposing ominous wires and switches inside. Old existing poles lean precariously and when new poles are erected, the base is left surrounded by excavated rubble with strips of insulation and pieces of wire. Nobody cares that the job is incomplete or that there is a danger of electrocution. True that it was done in a hurry after Cyclone Hudhud, but the new LED lamps on the poles are askew and not aligned with the lamps on neighbouring poles. Along with our electric poles and electric wires run cable TV wires like some crazy parasitic vine about to strangle our entire city. They snake around the electric poles, hang low over our apartment gates and lie in coils on the ground. The cable industry pays to piggyback on electric poles to transport their cables, yet they appear to be completely unregulated. Since the cables are not labelled, we don't even know which company they belong to. Here too "finishing" and tidiness are unknown words.
Unfinished public projects
What about government projects? In April 2013, the then Union minister of state for tourism, K Chiranjeevi, announced a central finance assistance of Rs 45.88 crore for the development of the Visakhapatnam-Bheemunipatnam beach corridor project of which Rs 8 crore was budgeted for the RK Beach to Park Hotel stretch. The government declared that the entire project, all the way to Bheemunipatnam, would be completed in 18 months. Going by that it should have finished by October 2014 but even the RK Beach section is yet to be completed. All over the Beach Road pavement we can see that finishing work has been left out. Cables and pipes stick out of the pavement, building material is left in mounds everywhere, many tiles have been removed from the pavement as if they forgot to put something underneath and so on.
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong
It is guaranteed that every government executed project will run into legal hassles; it will be delayed, the costs will escalate, financing burdens will mount and when completed, it will leave substantial portions poorly executed and in an incomplete state. Take our JNNURM BRTS project with an initial estimated cost of Rs 455 crore. It was to be completed in January 2011 but is far from finished and mired in litigation and land transfer issues. The project proponents do not even take the initiative of setting right small problems that can make our life easier while waiting for the big solutions. For example where the BRTS crosses the Vepagunta-Sabbavaram road, a short stretch of around 50 meters is like the pock-marked surface of Mars. GVMC could fix this in two days but it has remained there, a vestige of some contractual bloomer, to harass road user for years. Further down, as we approach Pendurthi, the normal traffic lane becomes a narrow bottleneck with foot deep craters that could stop a military tank. We are told that a short stretch is stuck due to legal issues but does this prevent the authorities from surfacing the road temporarily? We don't know.
Are we ready for big projects?
As Vizag drags itself from just another 2-tier city to 'Smart City' status, there will be plenty of infrastructure projects to be done. The elevated rail 'Vizag Metro' will cost around Rs 7,000 crore to cover 30 km. Again it is guaranteed to throw up legal, technical and financial issues along the way. If we go about this in the "business as usual" manner we will face delays, cost escalations, poor execution and poor finish. Large modern corporations avoid such traps because they define the scope of work better, plan better and enforce time schedules scrupulously. For example, Infosys didn't have such issues when developing their Rs 1,650-crore Mysore campus. It's also important to anticipate every problem that may come up and a contingency plan to solve it. For example, if we expected BRTS to run into legal hassles because of a village in its path, we should have gone under or over it. Even if it costs more, it will be lower than the cost escalation due to delays.
Prepare or perish
Over the next decade, Vizag will need not only great planners and project managers but also an army of masons, carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, welders, crane operators, heavy vehicle drivers security men and so on. It is obvious that we must kick-start our technical metamorphosis with huge investments in vocational training. Every worker must be made to realise the importance of clean execution and full completion. "Parwa ledhu" must be banned from our vocabulary. Working with hands must be elevated in importance to working in front of a keyboard. Menial jobs must be seen to have more oomph. Our HRD minister has his work cut out for him. All contracts must be scoped fully and budgeted realistically. Most importantly, just because we are gung-ho about a project we must never ever ride roughshod over environmental concerns. If we are going to cut down 5,000 trees we must plant 50,000 trees two years ahead of the project and maintained for the life of the project. We must build in the cost of high quality transplanting equipment into every contract so that as many old trees as possible can be saved.
God is in the details
All this might sound like typical homilies but the fact remains that the big brains that handle our projects sometimes get so lost in political grandstanding, legal, financial and technical details that they lose track of common sense practices. We must remember God is in the details. Every project must not only be implemented well but finished properly with the last screw tightened, the last coat of paint painted and the work place tidied up. Good implementation must end with diligent finishing. I have finished.
(The writer is an environmental and heritage activist. He can be reached at sohan.hatangadi@gmail.com)