Unlocking the gate of Quality to enter India’s Golden Era

P Rajagopal Tampi

Introduction

In my last blogpost, I had written about overcoming the barrier of “Low integrity” so that India can achieve its full potential in the upcoming Golden Era. https://rajtampi.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-one-barrier-to-indias-coming-golden.html .

In this post, I will be discussing an effective way to improve Integrity of the whole nation. For this purpose, I will be using the proxy of “Achieving High Quality” in every product and service originating or provided in India including human aspects. I will also list concrete actions which can be taken by India to achieve a quantum improvement in the Quality of everything we do. This will enable India to compete in premium products and services categories and thereby improve pricing power. It will also be help in raising our country’s levels of integrity and help achieving the full potential of our upcoming Golden Era.

Some nations which build high Quality products

Germany has been renowned for quality of manufactured goods. This as been achieved through a very strong work-ethic and a perfectionist mindset¹. Germans are very “reputation conscious” where manufacturing, products, technology and Quality are concerned. Their education system encompasses “apprenticeship” based education. They compete by manufacturing premium products due to their well-honed capability to manufacture high Quality products. The Government formed “Deutscher Werkbund” an Association of craftsmen in 1907 to improve the competitiveness of German companies in the global markets. They also formed a Steel Federation in 1874 to be able to access and use the best quality of steel during the Industrial Revolution. The “Mittelstand” was based on small, nimble businesses with narrow focus on doing one thing really well² resulting in high Quality and export orientation. They are largely owner driven with a long-term business vision.

Japan started focusing on Quality after World War 2. They learnt and imbibed TQM principles from the Americans Deming and Juran. They built their own Quality champions like Taguchi. The principles of Kaizen were embraced. The CEO of a Japanese company is a member of the Quality Council. They concentrated on improving all organizational processes through the people who used them. They changed their incentive systems to align with the changes demanded by world-class quality³.

Switzerland the land of luxury watches such as Rolex, Patek Phillipe and Breguet achieved quality due to superior craftsmanship and industriousness⁴. They were willing to put in large amounts of capital to build factories and procure equipment. They developed an ability to adapt to changing markets to maintain their market leadership. They were also able to build watches for fashion as it evolved.

Quality Essentials

The main use cases of Quality include products and services quality, business quality, governance quality, judicial quality, security and military quality and social quality on a vertical level. On a horizontal level, the major components driving Quality are broad in nature and include specifications to be met, corruption levels, bureaucracy/red tape, levels of licensing, fairness and timeliness of justice delivered and freedom of the press in addition to human aspects.

Some of the necessary human aspects to achieve high Quality are honesty, dedication, sincerity, putting national interests ahead of individual interest, hard work, fair and co-operative attitudes of citizens and more. These can be only be achieved by inspirational leadership and hence the need to develop top class leaders in India.

Nations that have become global leaders have always recognized and promoted merit. Other criterion like reservations and quotas have not delivered global leadership.

Learning and self-implementation of Quality at the individual level is not enough. We need other drivers at the organizational and national levels to propagate and embed Quality within Government, PSU and Private sector initiatives and their enforcement. Quality awareness creation, prioritization, participation at the highest level, target setting, reviews cycles, recognition, incentivization, funding, wide collaboration, responding to external and internal changes are some of the core ingredients needed to build Quality on an unshakeable foundation.

Government and Corporates must allocate funds in the Budget and Business Plans to achieve Quality with clear targets. National level Quality improvements are achieved over may decades, so these must be long term initiatives. They need deep roots in terms of financial and human investments. The Japanese took about 25 years from 1950s to 1975 to catch up with the US on the quality of their cars³. It will take us upwards of two decades to achieve a significant improvement in Quality if we start today.

Every organization must have its own Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) Departments. The QC function must be truly autonomous and report to the highest Executive of the organization which it serves.

How to improve Quality of India’s products and services?

Minister and Ministry of Quality – Cabinet rank

While the Quality Council of India (QCI) established under DPIIT is laudable, it is insufficient if we are to achieve our vision of India’s Golden Era. It is necessary to have a full-fledged Central Ministry under a Cabinet rank Minister for implementing national Quality. All organizations responsible for the constituents of Quality such as corruption elimination and others mentioned above must mandatorily be brought under the jurisdiction and control of the Quality Ministry. Till the time Quality is well established, the Prime Minister himself should become the Minister for Quality. Such is its great importance of India’s improvement of Quality for the future generations of Indians.

We must be prepared to make major long-term investments in our National Quality Mission and its work. The nation's Quality Budget must form part of the Annual Finance Minister’s Budget. A core activity of the Quality Ministry is to target cost benefits of every Quality project to be achieved during the financial year. This approach will progressively reduce the investments required in Quality over a long period as payback begins to kick in from higher pricing power, greater exports, reduced current account deficits and cost savings achieved through various Quality initiatives.

The glue holding the Quality organization together is knowledge of Quality standards and processes expected of human being and robotic users if any. This knowledge is disseminated to every stake holder through training. Hence Quality training must form a line item in the Annual Budget of the Finance Minister and all cascading budgets.

The National Quality Mission (NQM)

The National Quality Mission (NQM) must be created to plan, implement and upgrade the Quality standards in India under the Ministry of Quality. The NQM should be the national apex Organization which has representation for the Center and for all States of India. The Board of the NQM must include the State Chief Minsters. Non-political eminent citizens and thinkers must be part of the NQM’s Board. Well qualified, experienced, eminent citizens and thinkers must form at least 25 percent of the NQM Board strength. They must be the have Veto power to block items/proposals/projects that come up for a Board vote. The States must have parallel Quality organizations and allocate budgets as the Center does.

One of the crucial tasks of the NQM will be to lay down digitally auditable Quality specifications guidelines for projects, procurement, Ministries, PSUs and other Organizations which it oversees. The Audit Department of the NQM must be autonomous.

Government Ministries and PSU’s

The Government Ministries and PSUs should have their internal Quality organizations aligned with the NQM. For this, there will be a representative of the NQM posted in each Ministry and PSU. The Ministries and PSU’s will have to submit their annual Quality plans, targets and budgets to the NQM through their NQM representative. They will be audited by the NQM. There will be an annual conference on Quality for Ministries and PSUs organized by the NQM.

Projects and Procurement executed by the Center and States

All projects and procurement initiated by the Center and States will have to obtain Quality certification from the NQM for specifications through the NQM Central and State representatives.

Industry Bodies

CMIE, NASSCOM, FICCI, ASSOCHAM should deepen their collaboration on Quality. There will be an annual Quality Conference for the Private sector organized by the NQM.

Judiciary and Courts

The Judiciary will be part of the nation-wide Quality drive. The twin aspects of fairness of justice delivered and its timeliness must be the Quality focus. There should be no backlog of cases in the Courts. There must be an NQM representative in the Supreme Court and all High Courts. The NQM should push for speedy justice delivery in States and the Supreme court.

Election Commission

A citizen who has been convicted and imprisoned must be banned from holding public office including standing for elections. Unless a person is a school pass, the person must not be eligible to stand for elections. There must be an NQM representative in the Election Commission. The NQM should audit the complaints and cases raised by politicians/political parties/ public to the EC and evaluate them as per the Quality processes laid down for the EC.

Harnessing Technology and data effectively

NQM must be digitally operated and audited. India has utilized technology with world-beating efficiency during Covid. The same seriousness, determination and purpose must be brought to bear in the implementation of Quality in India. We are also the de-facto world leader in software. The NQM will require the capture of humungous amounts of data, making sense of it in an automated fashion, and effectively executing the resulting projects to improve Quality further. A separate Data and Technology Center for processing Quality related data on the lines of the NCPI and the NSO will be required.

Conclusion

It is very rare and a matter of great pride for a nation to be in a position to dominate the world. Such an opportunity comes to very few nations scarce once in 300-500 years. Today, as India stands on the threshold of our Golden Era, we must make every effort to overcome any hurdle that may prevent us from achieving our objective. The NQM will help us improve both Quality and Integrity levels.

“The 20^th century was the century of production, the 21^st century will be the century of Quality” as per JM Juran³. But he was not entirely correct. The 22^nd century and all future centuries will find Quality as the cornerstone of the foundation of nations which dominate the world.

References:

1. Ideas2it.com blog.

2. Wikipedia

3. Washington Post, “What Japan taught us about quality”, Aug 15, 1993

4. New York Times, “How Switzerland came to dominate watchmaking”, Nov 20, 2014, Victoria Gomelsky

The views expressed are the solely that of the author with no intention whatsoever to create conflicts

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