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Just like our crowded airports, we have congestion on our city roads – though not more severe. We don’t see any bureaucrat or minister at state or city levels concerned about these. Somewhere in our national mental makeup do we love to have queues for everything?
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(Learnings from the Delhi airport T3 congestion incident highlights how we miss the public -governance mechanism in the narrative of the pressure-pot called optics, and forget the need for ensuring accountability. That aside, we need to understand that infrastructure development should not just have physical-form being built, but also include processes, systems and the mechanism to ease public usage of such public-goods. It is time to design Infrastructure as a public-service.)
What started as a flurry of Twitter complaints about the terrible congestion at Delhi airport’s T3 a few weeks ago, soon dominoed into a Union Minister’s need to intervene. Of course, he did visit the airport a week before the final solution shaped up and not much happened, until much noise from passengers ensured that it did. But all in all, the crowd handling improved quickly and finally.
For even a rookie process-flow analyst, it would be evident where the problems were. The problems did not arise overnight. One simply needed to staff-the-closed entry points and security gates to speed up the security processing time by adding more equipment, and by adding faster IT systems at
the check-in counters and by linking them to the baggage systems, with speedier processing. For an airport that costs many thousand crores to build, all of the above is a rounding-off error in value. Yet we found this nuisance of an issue snowballing to cause inconvenience to passengers for days on end.
*Public governance failure
While the twitterati and the mainstream media might praise the concerned minister for the “action taken”, here is why this incident is an example of misplaced or flawed public governance.
What a waste of a Union Minister’s time it is to work on a solution for a single airport’s congestion problem. Is it even the minister’s job in the first place? Of course (s)he has to jump in for better public grievance handling, political optics, more so, considering the mess was right at the doorstep in Delhi and during the Parliamentary session and G20 meetings.
Even a smaller-scaled mall-operator seems to understand visitor flow and plan better for it. Can’t our airport operators and the concerned officialdom learn passenger delight – especially those who don’t have any fast-track access or VIP facilities? One would assume that they would have contractual obligations of passenger facilities and time limits in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), as part of the airport management agreement with the government.
Arguably, the private airport operator did not do their job. The question that arises is: was someone in the officialdom even monitoring the delays and issues? In the first place, is there even someone measuring issues regularly and checking redressal delays? Then the next escalation points from airport operator to AAI to bureaucrats in the civil aviation ministry – all seem to have failed. What were the entire chain of command doing until it became a public spectacle, especially when India is hosting G20?
If all these failures actually forced the minister to jump into action, who will now fix accountability lapses, and by when? Or will we simply move from this mess to the next crisis?
*Defining infrastructure as a service
Forget Delhi T3. We take pride in comparing the wrong things – for our trolls will post photos of crowds in other foreign airports and claim that we are faring better. Let’s learn that we can set fantastic positive examples in bettering our civic infra, just as we have done in many, including our digital infrastructure space.
As the nation steers ahead with developing newer public civic infra capacities, we will face many such issues. We already face, but do not hear much at the national level, of the issues that plague our cities’ infrastructure development with similar public inconveniences. We can’t expect accountability from the entire chain of command, from anyone who builds any projects – be it roads dug up for piping infrastructure (public or private sector), or metro construction or flyovers. A factor that we don’t seem to respect is the damage it does to the local citizens – time delays, air pollution as well as noise pollution.
Just like our crowded airports, we have congestion on our city roads – though not more severe. We don’t see any bureaucrat or minister at state or city levels concerned about these. Somewhere in our national mental makeup do we love to have queues for everything? Can’t we outgrow that weakness in eliminating the need for long queues to show that something is actually working? Will we at least
have a change of heart, if we add the cost of such wasted man hours spent in our clogged public infra to our GDP?
Sadly, the easiest way out for policy makers is to reduce the capacity utilisation – like reduce the number of flights operated in a certain time window, etc. This is a joke on the public, for it defeats the purpose of having built such a capacity in the first place. Is our mindset based on the assumption that people would be thankful for the physical infrastructure provided, and would be ready to face any difficulties and inconvenience in accessing them?
Can’t we plan our development projects better and execute them to a time plan? Can we start including services as an essential aspect in every infrastructure project and budget for them well? We have to change our mindset that Infrastructure projects are only about physical brick and mortar, and start including the associated services that makes it conducive to public access and usage. Similarly, here, can we have better public governance and accountability of the entire value chain – starting with the vendor or contractor to all those in the chain of command supervising the efforts from the government side?
We need to be mindful of public governance, of who is responsible for what, and how it is measured and used for decisioning. For a better society, what and how we measure public-governance will determine the quality of citizen engagement with the polity and policy space. The government has championed the usage of data and digital for better public good, and it might be useful to have higher quality public governance of infra projects and infra services. We need our public governance to percolate into our social consciousness and public (service) behaviour.
Dr. Srinath Sridharan - Author (Time for Bharat) & Corporate Advisor
Twitter : @ssmumbai