Why Indian engineering is below par

Bangalore has gotten hotter, and much sooner in the year, than I ever remember it. It's gotten so I find it hard to get to sleep at night without air-conditioning. As an interim measure, since I don't know how long I'll be here, I decided to get what is euphemistically referred to as a "room cooler". In point of fact, such devices do not cool the room, but do provide a cooler air flow in a swath a couple of feet wide and about 10 feet deep, using the principle of evaporative cooling. You can set it to oscillate, which means you get about 3 seconds of cool breeze for every 10 that it is on. Evaporative cooling works best in low-humidity weather, such as Bangalore has at the moment, but the benefit diminishes with rising humidity levels. So, right now, it's best to use it with the windows open, and when the humid weather gets here, to leave it off altogether.

Anyhow, I bought a Bajaj room cooler, which is a brand well-known and respected in India, and the manufacturer of the Bajaj Pulsar motorcycle, which is one of the better motorcycles in India, designed by the British-born Glynn Kerr. I unpack it, and read the instructions, which are pretty basic. The first thing I have to do is fill the receptacle with water, pouring it into an opening at the top of the machine, until the "built-in water gauge" reads full.

So I'm filling it carefully, watching the gauge. It looks like it still has a bit to go before it's full. At this point, I see water pooling on the polished tile floor, which is not something I like to see, having slipped in one such puddle and broken my wrist. I start swearing, and quickly get a towel to mop up the seeping water.

Muttering to myself about the possibility of a cracked water tank, I take a closer look and find a label helpfully pointing to the source of the leak:

Really, Bajaj? Overflow? But your *#%@ gauge said it wasn't full yet! And if you knew this was where it was going to overflow, why didn't you design in a catch jar, or something, so it wouldn't start spilling right away on the smooth-as-glass polished tile floor that most Indian homes seem to have and make me slip and break my limbs? Even better, why didn't you put in a Plexiglas window in the tank where I could actually see the water level instead of relying on your *#%@ gauge(which has a Plexiglas window in front of it)?

As trifling as this may seem, it points to why Indian design still has a long way to go to, if it ever will, catch up to western design. The problem, as I see it, is a failure to consumer-test or "de-bug",  a term that should be familiar to software-centric India. De-bugging involves product testing in real-world settings- or settings simulated to the real-world as closely as possible- and consumer clinics and such. I see many examples of such unacceptable design failures in Indian goods, construction and services every day, which is one reason why they fail to make headway overseas unless it is the result of overseas collaboration, such as with the Hyundai i10 or the Suzuki Swift, or even the prodigious software that is produced to the design parameters, specifications and oversight of western clients. Even Indians dismissively refer to poor-quality products as "local", reinforcing the mindset that anything produced locally does not have to be made to a superior(read "western") standard. It is a careless inattention to detail and finish, enabled by the "local" mindset.

Anyways, my towel is now drying on the floor while the Bajaj "room cooler" produces a swathe of relatively cooler air that will hopefully lull me to sleep tonight! That is, as long as the power doesn't conk too frequently...........

UPDATE: This room cooler thing just didn't work for me, often resulting in a humid room by early morning, unless there was enough of a breeze to clear the room. It was a p-i-t-a to keep the thing topped up, since it usually depleted in 8-10 hours. Moreover, the sediment in the city water was a big problem, turning everything that the water ran over a muddy brown color. And that's without even getting into biological hazards in the water. So I ended up doing what I should have done to begin with: bought an energy-efficient air-conditioner, which has run pretty much non-stop since I bought it. And I'm sleeping well once again.

This was what the water in the holding tank looked like after about 10 days of use



Postscript: I think I will occasionally add things that I come across that pertain to this Indian under-engineering issue. Yesterday, the hose on a water-heater("geyser") split, and I discovered four things. First, the heater had no non-return valve to prevent back-washing of hot water through the cold water pipe, especially when pressure drops on the input side. This, of course, leads to energy loss. The second thing I found was that the shut-off valve was on the hot water outlet side, which meant I could not shut off the incoming cold water to the heater without shutting off the water for the whole house. Way to go! Third, the heater unit(V-Guard, Krystal series) did not have a watertight electrics compartment like it should have, given that these things are installed usually right by the shower area, so when the hose split it spewed hot water(since it had never shut off due to wiring issues) into the electrical compartment shorting out the electrics and setting the plastic bits on fire. The fourth thing was that the power outlet's electrical wiring was so messed up that power was flowing to the heater with the switch in the off position, which resulted, unbeknown to me, in the heater operating for months while I thought it wasn't being used. There is no color-coding whatsoever used in the wiring, and as a result the outlets are rife with ground-faults. I've opened outlets in which all the wiring was black, or all white, or all brown. The golden rule seems to be, just run what ya brung! That wiring needs to be color-coded- and with good reason- seems to be something Indian electricians are blissfully unaware of, and apparently just as blissfully overlooked when certificates of occupancy are given.

April, 2013: My handheld shower sprung a leak on the back of the shower-head, something I have never seen in 3 decades of using hand-held showers. This is a relatively new unit, just over 2 years old, and fairly expensive as Indian bath fixtures go. My guess is the chrome was plated over a substandard core which either already had a pinhole, or developed one because the material was not meant to be used in this application. In any case, another fail for Indian engineering. Is it unreasonable to expect that a shower fixture should function as intended for at least 10 years? I can just see a product engineer saying, "That's good enough for local use!" before signing off on production.