These are interesting times when TV
anchors and authors in India and elsewhere are finding philosophical
appeal and mass purchase potential in old allegorical narratives, while
western management schools and communication gurus are rediscovering
story-telling at the centre of communication-effectiveness measured by
stickiness.
I am often reminded of a story from
the Mahabharata epic and it is new age version that experience has
helped me develop – the story of Guru Dronacharya asking the Kauravas
and the Pandavas to take aim at the eye of a wooden bird placed on a
tree branch. The moral is that if you see nothing but what you aim for,
you will definitely get it. Also, one prominent implication practiced is
‘you wait until you reach 100% certainty/clarity’. Often happily
forgotten is the fact that this was training context, not the real
battle one.
The story of preventive health and its
link to the availability of safe drinking water and broadly to WASH
coverage looks like a case in point. As the story and mythological
extract go, only Arjuna sees the bird’s eye and nothing else, while
everyone else sees something or the other besides the eye of the bird.
And hence, Drona asks only Arjuna to try and, as expected, he
successfully hits the bird’s eye.
Obviously, I am nobody to question Drona
and his great wisdom, but very often we have seen the greatness of large
schemes and grand designs become the bane of a simple, quickly
realizable, satisfactory action. Frankly, what is the point of hitting
the bird in the eye? Just hit it, anywhere, that’s good enough!
Point is let’s not over-constraint the
solution design. In urban plans, it is only fair to assume that every
household ‘should’ be connected to piped water supply and ‘should’ get
adequate quantity of good quality water for household purposes including
for drinking. But knowing fully well that such a plan will take long
before it reaches everyone, not keeping space for nimble community level
drinking water infrastructure as an interim solution is like betting
100% on a blueprint.
Simply put things are iterative, the
solution will evolve. Pursuing excellence and improvement at every step
is better than waiting for the perfection of a great grand blueprint
that will be implemented en masse in a homogenized manner.
Writing this I am also aware of the fact
that the new age management Guru Jim Collins, who I agree with more
often than not, popularized the concept of ‘Good being enemy of Great’
implying complacence of good stops further improvement. My humble
submission is that there are cases where ‘waiting for great is becoming
the enemy of good’. In fact on some further digging one finds similar
sentiments being expressed through the times of Confucius, Aristotle,
Shakespeare and Voltaire.
In my limited understanding and experience
‘reaching everyone, soon enough, with good quality and adequate
quantity’ is the noble goal for public services. The goal is not to
reach everyone with the same or single blueprint.
A recurring blog by Sarvajal CEO Anuj Sharma – an educationist
at heart, who began with Pratham – has been with Piramal Sarvajal since
its inception in 2008. He keeps stirring the turgid pot of knowledge as
far as all-around solutions for the safe and reliable drinking water
problem called Beyond The Pipe go.
