A Ripple on Grand Trunk Road

The NDLS-CDG Shatabdi makes its way through the onslaught of raindrops towards its destination, Chandigarh; the city beautiful. One of the richest and most fertile belts in India, part of the massive road built by Sher Shah Suri, the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road) from New Delhi to Chandigarh has been my most frequented path this past year. Working with the state of Haryana on its flagship initiative, the Chief Minister’s Good Governance Associates, I have witnessed and been associated in a multitude of decisions that got taken in the hallowed buildings of “Sarkar” (Government)! Sitting on the last seat of the AC coach in Shatabdi, I look at all the people sitting and living their lives in their own way, oblivious to my existence.

Just a few days ago, I was listing out to one of my friends all the things we have been able to achieve this last year in the state. At the end of it, it struck me that nobody would ever know or speak of all this say 10 years down the line. Maybe some of these things would not even exist. Time buries everything.

Nobody remembers Sher Shah Suri today for having built the massive GT Road stretching from Chittagong in the east to Kabul in the west cutting across all the key trading towns of his time. How did he even pull it off given the limitations of his time? How did he feel about the fact that the road would probably be completed after decades, maybe never? How did he cope with it being but a minuscule addition to a plethora of initiatives that millions of humans took and will take forever? It was not even a new thing, it was but an extension of a road that existed for centuries before his time. How many of the 1.2 billion people of India even know of the GT Road, let alone its architect? What did he even achieve then?



The journey this year has been ardent, straining and exhausting. But saying just that would be grossly unfair to the steep learning curve and the satisfaction of having worked on something real, something that touched lives. Reflecting on my own growth, the kind of knowledge and skills I've picked up this year are tremendously nuanced. They're immense in quantity too but I feel that the nuances of what I've picked is something that is critical, given that Government is a very nuanced system.

Managing a meeting - one of my seniors once said to me, "all meetings are but a show. They need to be orchestrated if you want anything out of it". I wasn't able to grasp the subtlety in that statement until I stepped back and thought through on how we went about any meeting.

1. There is an extensive phase of preparation where we meet everyone relevant to understand the issue that would get discussed, document all information in a format that would be easily accessible & understandable by us.

2. Then there is a phase of brain storming on how we would solve the problem at hand. This also includes a part where we plan out how we bring each stakeholder on board. This can mean anything from making a call to that person to taking that person to a site to create an experience to leveraging a network to put pressure.

3. A meeting then finally gets scheduled with all stakeholders and a round of meetings again to take each one of them through the agenda of the meeting and the points that would get discussed. It also involved mitigating any risk whatsoever. In effect, by the end of this round you've already achieved the outcome that you wanted (if everything has gone well). You also ensure in this round that the points raised by stakeholders are feeding into the plan for the actual meeting.

4. The meeting itself will now be reduced to a mere formality at this stage but nonetheless it is key to ensuring a successful outcome. Here it requires orchestrating what everyone says. There are discussion points prepared, small snippets of data points written on a piece of paper to pass to the right person at the right time, seating arrangement to ensure everyone is sitting in the right places and above all, knowing what is going to happen and preparing for all outcomes.



Is this time consuming? Yes. Is this straining? Yes. Is this boring? Yes. Does this achieve results? Absolutely. Why? Because you've controlled every single step. Meetings are not a point event in space & time. They're a living, breathing organism that is born right at the time it was decided in your head that it needs to be held. If not groomed well, it can grow into a nightmare and if done well, can stop wars!

This was but one task in the entire scheme of things. What about writing a letter? What about conducting a training session? What about preparing work pieces? When I say this year has been straining, I don't mean to say I was tired everyday. I mean to say that I've strained every single nerve in my brain to keep track of thousands of variables across hundreds of tasks running simultaneously. Putting it in perspective, if one meeting takes so much effort and work, imagine having 5 in one day. When do you start planning for each? When do you complete meeting people? When do you problem solve? What if one meeting gets rescheduled? 

I got to understand the system through the year. How each officer interacts with the other. When does an officer keep quiet, when does he/she vent and when he/she constructively solves for a problem. How does a bureaucrat deal with the politician? How do ideologies of right, left & centre trickle down into the functioning of government? I also got to know how implementation happens at scale. The compromises, the pains, the motivations, the management, the responsibility, the accountability and gazillion other things that could just come together in an entire book. There were almost 15 State wide initiatives, over 40 department specific initiatives and about 40 district level pilots. A team of 7 managing 21 people taking care of each and everything under every work piece. If we consider just the number of meetings, in one of the state wide initiatives we have had almost 1000 meetings in the year. Now anybody can approximate what all workstreams put together must have meant.

But here I am, almost arriving at the destination, the Shatabdi making up for the lost time at a crossing wondering if I'll be remembered at all, and if I will be, then for what? What have we had a million meetings for? What have we made those terabytes of documents and excel sheets for? What have we gotten out of the crores of money spent on this programme, out of the energies of some of the best minds in the country?



Disruptive Innovation, read the slide flashing on an off-white wall in the office. Speaking to us was one of Google's brightest. One who has worked on some of world's largest initiatives. He said, innovation is not a "woah this is massive" every time. It's an incremental function. When Google launched its search engine, it was not something new. There were many other search engines before and Google was just step up. Further, when Google navigation was started in India, they didn't anticipate at all that an entire industry of rental cabs (Uber, Ola etc) would depend on it. There was no way for them to visualize all the use cases at that point in time. Going back to Sher Shah Suri and the GT Road, this mammoth road was first built during the Mauryan times, over a millennium before Sher Shah Suri. Over the centuries, multiple empires have built and broken the road. Sher Shah only renovated and extended it to suit his needs. I can imagine that even the Mauryan empire would've built on an existing pathway that travelers took. Everyone, at every point in time has built on something that existed before. Innovated over and above an innovation. Done something better than what it was the day before. Today, GT Road is one of Asia's largest roadways. There's even an amazing restaurant in New Delhi by the name GT Road which has cuisines from all major towns of the GT Road. Could the Mauryan empire or Sher Shah Suri think that a restaurant with all its staff get managed because of a road? What then pushed all those people to build that road? To expend so much time, energy and resources when they were not even sure of its impact? Maybe their were failures in between too. Maybe there was a stretch of road that one of them built which costed lakhs but doesn't exist today. What was its impact? What's the purpose of failures?

I feel, impact, change or purpose is not limited by space and time. It is a ripple. Every single ripple, no matter how small adds to and supports the next ripple. Like mentioned earlier, these are meant to be step functions to something better than what exists today. What I can be sure of is we've left a ripple. Maybe how we run meetings will change the very way people think of meetings sometime in the future, for now it has changed how few functionaries in Haryana Government run their meetings. All of us will go forward to build on these learnings and models in our lives. There many more ripples that we as individuals have left behind and as a programme we've left behind a model that has worked, an idea that young professionals can be leveraged productively to deliver governance mandates. Who knows what that will go on to grow into one day. There are many possibilities and all of us can be hopeful.

Maybe Sher Shah Suri hoped a restaurant opens up on Mars named GT Road and he's gotten to Delhi already!