It’s the 60 anniversary of an extremely noteworthy date in history. Almost to the hour, it was on this day, 60 years ago that India became independent from British rule and took baby steps into the big bad world, all on her own. My grandfather was not a freedom fighter, a social crusader or even a closet rebel, but he was great in his own right. He was a person who despite being raised in conditions of abject poverty changed all that by the dint of his own hard work and rose to the rank of an Assistant Executive Engineer in the Central Public Works Department, then run by the British. His life story is one that makes for fabulous reading and I promise I will write more about it on another occasion, but for now, let me not meander. My grandfather always said that the actual achievement of independence was but a minor problem and that several issues far bigger but far more ignored existed, that threatened to stifle India, after she got her Independence, and my grandfather turned out to be right.
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While at NCST, I was going through a book titled ‘India Unbound’ by Gurcharan Das, a book that belonged to my good friend and voracious reader Nandan Nadkarni. The book straight away gives the reader the following impressions:
1) Gurcharan Das knows what he is talking about.
2) The politicians, with Nehru in dead centre, led India into the doldrums with their near-sighted policies.
3) Gurcharan Das is not a fan of Jawarhar Lal Nehru!

The last point is especially obvious, but jokes apart, the politicians (with a few notable exceptions) have done everything that they possibly could to destroy the Indian economy, but we have survived(to what extent is a totally different issue).
My grandfather was a civil engineer and had been involved in several prestigious projects and even had the honor of working alongside the great Sir M Vishveshwariah, and he knew what he was talking about when he said that the British were superior planners. To them, whether it was building a road, a railway line or a bridge, the task meant hiring the best of brains to do the planning and design and the best of workers to turn the concept into reality, and the results are there for us to see, even to this day. A couple of years back, when the contractors hired by the inept municipality corporation of Bangalore started excavation work in order to lay the foundation of a flyover, they discovered a network of sewers that were running underground. What takes the cake was that it was still in almost perfect condition and was very much in use! The pathetic municipality officials did not even know that the sewer system existed! It was laid by the British. Dismantling the sewer system without making alternate arrangements would mean that a part of Bangalore would be flooded during the next rainy season. It caused a big flutter, forcing the miserable excuses for officials to go into a huddle to plan the next move, leading to further delay and expense for the taxpayer, and this is by and large the state of affairs in every state in the so called ‘Independent Republic of India’.

We do have examples of amazing wonders of construction like the Kashmir-Leh highway (currently the highest motorable highway in the world) and the suspension bridge at Krishnarajapuram, Bangalore, but these are the exceptions and not the rule, and we need not have a smug expression of achievement on our faces on their account. Why were the British by far better planners? For one, as I have mentioned earlier, they just needed to recruit the best of people and while doing that, they never had to think about what castes and communities the candidates belonged to and whether the reservation criterion would be met by their selection. A team selected on basis of their abilities will perform and one in which the members have been selected due to other considerations will not. As simple as that. Are we really independent? Have we really made India better than what might have been if the British had continued to rule over us? That is a question that each and every self-respecting Indian will have to ponder over.
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Oh, by the way, I know for a fact that NCST aka C-DAC, Mumbai will not be having a flag hoisting on campus, even though it is Independence day. You might even want to read this post of mine. Why? Some achaic government red-tape and organizational inertia. I will be attending the flag hoisting ceremony though, at C-DAC, Pune, where I’m working now.