Philip Crosby Sounds Wakeup Call For India

The government, the private business community and the people should all work together in an organised way to ensure the development of proper infrastructure in order to generate more jobs.

This is Philip B Crosbys advice to India.

According to the worlds leading quality guru, the problem with India is that it suffers from complacency which affects its performance.

Crosby, best known for providing a definition of quality, the concept of zero-defect and the author of the bestselling book `Quality is Free, now heads the Philip Crosby Associates. He was in India for a week at the invitation of the Institute of Quality Limited (IQL).

 

Lack of proper infrastructure is the main problem. Nobody will bring billions of dollars when nothing works, he said adding that most of the problems were management related. The key to all this is quality, he said.

Providing better infrastructure in terms of better roads, educational and health facilities and proper law and order is not the responsibility of the government alone, said Crosby. The people have to come forward and share the burden.

And, as a first step toward addressing quality issues in India, the people should be given proper educational opportunities.

Back in the 1970s, the US economy suffered because of a sense of complacency and it found itself losing market share.

As liberalisation gets along in a number of countries, the competition will increase, especially among developing countries.

In such a situation, India could find its markets disappearing, since the rest of the world will have moved further ahead in terms of product quality and performance. In todays world economy, people buy things on the basis of their quality and not on the basis of where they were manufactured. Thus guarantee of performance is of paramount importance.

For example, the Japanese auto major Toyota has a manufacturing facility in Kentucky in the US from where more than one tenth of the cars are sent to Japan.

In order to participate in such a world economy, Crosby says, Indians must have respect for integrity wherever quality issues are concerned.

When asked how the average person could be involved in quality issues when nearly one third of the people were living below the poverty line, he said it was the responsibility of the educated and the upper strata of society to involve themselves with creating better infrastructure, especially for education, and paying attention to quality aspects.

In the second stage, as jobs get created and infrastructure improves more and more people can be pulled out of poverty. Better education will ensure that they are drawn towards quality issues since quality affects everything, Crosby said.