Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam on Bringing Interdisciplinary Thinking to Project Management (#011)

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Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam on Bringing Interdisciplinary Thinking to Project Management (#011) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of parents would get very upset and say, My son has studied so hard, or my daughter has studied so hard.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: They've got into IIT, they've got a good chance of getting a job with a big multinational company with a paycheck with several zeros, and you want them to become a penniless entrepreneur.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what kind of an idiot are you?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is the kind of you know questions we used to you used to face.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this poor kid will come and say, I'm really interested, but I can't go against my parents.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: What shall I do?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to another edition of Contra.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a contradiction.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Over to my conversation with Dr.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Ashwin Mahaling.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Ashwin.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much uh for agreeing to join and talk to me on this podcast.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Swami.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, not at all.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the invitation.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like a very interesting podcast, so happy to be a part of it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Ashwin.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to talk to you first about the achievements that you have done in terms of uh you know building technology, construction management, your expertise in uh mega projects, the project management frameworks that you have worked on, the public-private partnership frameworks that you have.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: While we start talking about all that, and I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about it, I wanted to first Ashwin focus really on your early days.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you have a fantastic academic background, you're from IIT Madras, you did your master's from Stanford and then your doctorate from Stanford.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: How were your early years and did these interests in your subjects happen very early in your life?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, who were the inspiration that you had very early in your life?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks, uh Swami.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's uh that's an interesting question.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the short answer is uh no, I did not know all along that I was going to become uh you know civil engineer specializing in project management and a faculty at IIT.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think these are things that just happened along the way.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a family where academics was, of course, given importance.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the idea was that you rose in life by studying well and uh you know taking uh care of opportunities.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was lucky enough to get into IIT Madras.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very tough entrance examination.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there were lots of other candidates as well, but that day, I guess I was uh, you know, I wrote the exam well.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh see, I you I entered IIT Madras and took up civil engineering, to be very honest.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I was very passionate about civil engineering, but because my rank in the entrance examination was such that I could not get anything else.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: If I had been number one in India, I would have taken computer science.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I wanted.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But there were lots of smarter people above me.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So of the um subjects that were available, you know, we had civil engineering.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then in those days, uh uh so the good thing is my parents actually just completely let me make my decisions.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was no sort of, you know, why don't you go to IIT Karakpur and study chemical engineering or why don't you do this?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: We just said do what you want.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I took up civil engineering, and in those days, um, the this was in the mid-90s, mid to late 90s, where the Indian economy hadn't quite picked up.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh liberalization happened in 1991 and the effects were seen much later.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so in those days, all of us used to, or many of us used to go abroad after we finished uh studying at uh IIT Madras.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was just herd mentality.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone goes abroad, so I also went abroad.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um, of course, since I was in civil engineering, I specialized in civil engineering and got admitted into a program in construction management.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Again, there was really no design there.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I applied to some colleges for transportation engineering, structural engineering, construction was all over the place.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that I, again, I got lucky to get into a university like Stanford.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then at my entire view at that point was let me finish uh, you know, a couple of years, let me switch to computer science in the US and then start working for, you know, in those days, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Google and stuff was just coming along, which I sort of did.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I uh you know took a lot of courses in computer programming and then joined a startup.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: But uh things didn't quite work out with the startup, lots of economic turbulences, the 9-11 crash and all of that.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so I ended up coming back to Stanford, and my advisor at the time said, Look, I have a little bit of work for you.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can take some courses if you like, but um you know, at the same time, uh just help me out with this project.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, fine.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I took some courses in management this time to understand that world a little bit and entrepreneurship.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And just as I was leaving, he said, uh, one last task, can you write a research proposal for me before you go?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, fine, wrote the research proposal and got funded.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said, uh, ah, no, I've got a research proposal that's funded.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking for a student to work on it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder where I can find a student.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And by that time, I was hooked on to, I was really having a good time at the university, taking a lot of different classes and all of that.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, okay, this is an opportunity to stay a little longer.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh proposals come with a scholarship.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I got hooked into doing a PhD, which up to until that point I had never even contemplated.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And after I finished my PhD, I thought I'll go work for someone like the World Bank or something like that.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I came home to visit my parents in Chennai and just went as a courtesy call to visit my old professors at IIT.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly they took me out to a nice restaurant for lunch.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And while I was very happy enjoying that lunch, they said, Why don't you consider coming here as a faculty?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have an opening.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I again I've never really planned for it, just sort of ended up as a faculty.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, uh, I had a lot, so as you can see, the lots of influences along the way.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: My parents sort of taught me to choose my own path.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had lots of good, you know, my professors, advisors, everyone sort of, I think enabled me to look at a whole field of decisions and choose from them.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there's really no scientific basis behind choosing some of these.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think the decision to come back to India was really a gut decision.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm a big fan of cricket, they don't play cricket in the US, so it was a very easy, you know, decision to come back, uh uh to come back to India.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes, you know, it's it's decisions of the gut that matter.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, here I am, and I have to say that uh, you know, I've not I've never really regretted uh any of the choices that uh that I made.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Ashwin, the most important thing that I wanted to ask you really was you had a certain kind of uh education and a teaching experience at IIT Madras, and then you moved to Stanford, uh, where it would have been a different teaching experience.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Did that play a role in influencing your decision to take up the career that you've chosen?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And do you apply that back in your current teaching assignments?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So no to the first part and yes to the second.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, in the sense, I uh really don't consider myself to be a teacher.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So at IIT Madras, when I look at my job responsibilities, about maybe 20% of my time is teaching.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I literally you know teach maybe one or two courses a semester.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: This past semester my teaching was four hours a week, and that's it.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and about 60% of my time is really research and projects, and about maybe about 20% is general administration.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're part of an organization, you've got to help with various things.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I really see myself more as a researcher.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So what really drove me towards a PhD at Stanford and then IAT was the fact that I find research to be interesting.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, it's working on open-ended problems, nobody has solved it, you don't know what the answers will be.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of an exploratory exercise, which I really uh like.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: But having said that, um, you know, teaching is part of the job and it's a very visible part of the job.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone looks at a professor and says, You're a teacher.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in order to teach, clearly I picked up a lot, not only from IT, but especially from uh places in the US, where their uh philosophy on education is a bit different uh from where we uh from the way we do it.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we tend to sort of say, here is material that you need to learn.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh whereas there they sort of say, look, you know, let's not focus on the material, let's focus on the experience in terms of how you learn.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I was exposed to things like class participation, so forcing people to discuss and learning through discussion, you know, games and simulations in the classroom to put yourself in a real world situation.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And those are some things that I have then tried to bring back uh, you know, into IIT Madras.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So certainly the techniques and tactics that I've learned have influenced what I do, but um, you know, I didn't choose to come back because I was uh passionate about teaching.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoy teaching, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm really more passionate about research.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a great uh segue into the next section that I wanted to talk to you about is you are a recognized expert in mega projects and the project management frameworks of these mega projects.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to first ask you to help us define what is a mega project and how is it different from a project?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for that question.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there is actually a formal objective definition of what a mega project is.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a definition that says any project that costs uh above one billion US dollars is categorized as a mega project, right?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you can therefore now quickly say this is mega and that is not.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, as with all of these definitions, right?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a little bit difficult.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: 1 billion dollars in the US will get you something.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: The same 1 billion dollars in India will probably get you far more.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, with hundred uh million in India, you can probably do what you can do with 1 billion in the US.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not, you know, it's not a hard and fast uh rule, but uh yeah, roughly I think that sort of helps people make uh sense of it.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's roughly something in that ballpark, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hundreds of million, if not a billion dollars.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But really, the more objective way of defining it is uh in terms of complexity.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about complexity, we talk about the amount of interdependencies, you know, in any project, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you take um, you know, uh the building of a small house, uh there is not that much interdependency, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's one guy who comes in, you know, there's a fellow who brings a JCB and maybe excavates a little bit, there's a mace three who comes and he pours some concrete, and there's a finishing guy who comes, and so it's sort of sequential.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: In a mega project, um, you know, there are far more complex linkages, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, to give you an example, in an uh airport, right, you are building the structure of the airport, the size of your gate that you that you use to walk into the aircraft is proportional to the size of the aircraft.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there are innovations happening on aircrafts.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if you design today for a particular aircraft and um you know somebody Boeing or whoever it is now comes up with a completely different uh Airbus, comes up with a different kind of aircraft, your airport's not going to work.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, baggage handling systems, no, you put your bag in, it checks in, it comes out.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are all kinds of automated uh you know systems here.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And how does that work?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of space does it need?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of electrical uh you know requirements does it need?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there are lots of complexities, right?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just one person coming and doing their thing and walking away.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the more the complexity, the more likely this is uh likely to tend towards a mega project.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I think complexity is really where we define mega projects versus regular projects where the interdependency is not really that high.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: People come in, they do their work and they do.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when I uh went through this whole concept of a mega project, one of the things that fascinated me really was the fact that mega projects have a huge impact on the economies of countries, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they really talk about the Eisenhower's roads that got built after the World War II or the New York Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge, which is really the large projects that have redefined the basics of a country.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think a mega project kind of a vision have for a country like India?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you think mega projects will affect developing countries like India?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we all know that uh India requires a lot of infrastructure, broadly put, right?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And infrastructure doesn't need only roads and bridges and that kind of stuff.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: As we are seeing now with the whole COVID-19 uh pandemic, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Healthcare infrastructure needs to be uh you know beefed up.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've been complaining a lot about our overall education infrastructure.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have some very good schools with good facilities, we also have some very poor schools with poor facilities.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So infrastructure, social, physical, needs to sort of be given a big fill up.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, government of India over the years has been trying to invest in all of this education, housing, etc.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: But in some in some cases, if you really want to get the biggest bank for the buck, it's not enough to sort of invest in a small housing settlement here or maybe a bus stop here.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have to literally invest in a large, massive undertaking that will change the way the game is played.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, in a city like Chennai, for the last few years we've been building a metro, right?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we now have one phase of the metro that's operational.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, because of the pandemic, I think ridership has shrunk.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another phase of the metro that's uh coming up, and by the time we're done with about three or four phases of this metro, literally just like any city, like just like Paris, just like uh, you know, wherever, uh London, you can get into a train and you can go wherever you want.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: You don't necessarily need to sort of go on the road.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that changes the game quite a bit.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: It it now takes out, you know, earlier you needed to have uh you needed to have your own personal vehicle if you wanted to travel.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't have your own personal vehicle, you had to take public transport, but which was typically bus systems, but then you'd have to wait, buses might be crowded, you didn't know what travel times would be.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then you had these intermediate providers like the share auto person people coming in.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially transportation was not as smooth.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: But now, if you're saying in a city for the economy to grow, somebody in the north of the city should be equal to be able to access a job opportunity in the south of the city, right?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's cheaper to live in the north, but there's more places to work in the south, then you enable that by building these kinds of mega projects.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, the Chennai Metro enables this.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we need to start thinking about, and we have, we've talked, we've got all kinds of the number of metros that we are building, the number of airports that we are building.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there are these industrial corridors that we are building.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are not talking about a high-speed rail.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: The you know, first link is from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, and then hopefully there will be a spread of that across the country.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea is whether it's getting people to work, uh bringing water to people, bringing other services to people, bringing electricity to people.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Can we rethink these from small projects where I say, okay, let me put an extra bus stop here so that now these people can get a chance to take that crowded and delayed bus to saying, can I just change the game?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can I put in a whole new metro network?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's going to cost me a lot of money, it's very complex to do.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if I do it right and if it comes out, then uh you know you can do things that you could never do previously, and therefore our overall economic, social well-being improves and increases.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh that's a great answer.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what I read uh in one of the articles was that, say, for example, a country like China, you had the East-West gas pipeline, which completely changed the economy of almost say 24 districts or whatever where new cities got spawned.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And which is really where I think your expertise and theories of project management come into play.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because what I also read really was any mega project, normally you have cost overruns, right?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Even uh say a Sydney Opera House I read was about 1400% uh cost overrun.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So clearly, if cost overrun is an issue with public mega projects, project management and the frameworks that you really define public projects, mega projects become very, very important.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, can you throw some light on the complexity, the stakeholders, and how the project management principles have to be brought into play for these projects?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the first thing to understand is again, if you go back to the analogy of a simple project where you're building, you know, you have a small piece of land and you're building a house, right?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: The uh uncertainties in that are relatively low.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, assuming you have the title to the land and you know all of that, you know, we know reasonably well what kind of soil it is.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not very difficult to figure out what kind of foundation to put in.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Buying concrete is not difficult.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many cement manufacturers, there are so many contractors that can mix it for you.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Buying uh tiles, etc.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: None of this is particularly challenging or difficult.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it requires time, you need to follow up, etc.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: But in a mega project, right, you have all kinds of issues that come up, right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, you have issues with regards to uh stakeholders, right?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you build uh, for instance, one of these pipelines.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now the thing is, you know, sometimes these pipelines run through villages, okay?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Which means what happens to those people who live in that path where those pipelines where the pipeline runs through, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: It might be extremely expensive for you to reroute the pipeline because then you've got to make sure that the oil is flowing in these sort of directions.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or you'll have to resettle these people and nobody wants to be resettled, right?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps this is my ancestral home for generations.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my ancestors have lived here and we have tilled this soil and we are essentially sort of providing food for uh you know people elsewhere, right?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: How why would you make me move?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an issue.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now even if I'm convinced to move, right, you might have to pay me to move, right?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because obviously I'm suffering a loss here.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: What constitutes an appropriate payment?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can pay people, but what about the environment that you're uh destroying?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do you value that?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you have all of these kinds of concerns, and people will will raise them, and you have to have an effective way of solving these.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then, as the project progresses, you might come up with all new kinds of uncertainties.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, you might come up with a political change, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And a new government might decide that this is not necessarily the best use of taxpayers' money, right?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or it may not be a political change, but because of economic changes, a government that was in a really comfortable financial position might find itself no longer in such a position.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Again, COVID is a great example.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: The amount of money the government has had to spend to keep the pandemic under control naturally means that other projects, like for instance, the Metro, will have to take a little bit of a back seat.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's all of these uncertainties, right, unpredictabilities.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it means a couple of things, right?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can you've got to obviously manage the project, otherwise, how do you deal with these uncertainties?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: But typically, when we talk about managing projects, when the software industry talks about managing projects or when we do it in construction, we have these models that assume that projects are a sequence of activities that I have some amount of control of.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll have these various sort of techniques that you can use to plan these projects and optimize them, etc.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Problem is in these kinds of mega projects, you know, I plan to start uh you know building this road in six months, but uh, you know, so many things happened in six months that I haven't even acquired the land, right?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, what happened to my plan?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: It goes out the window.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the first lesson in terms of project management of mega project is being being able to be flexible in your planning, in your design, and sort of so many uh you know aspects that is uh that are very, very critical.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't have rigid project uh planning.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: You have, if you read a project management textbook, people will talk about something called, depending on which textbook you read, the golden triangle or the iron triangle.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, it's a triangle with time, cost, and scope at its three vertices.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And people will say, in order to manage a project well, you've got to be, you know, on budget, you've got to be on time, and you've got to finish your scope.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: But all of these three are moving targets, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how long this will take, depending on economic uh upheavals, political upheavals.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much this will cost because for the simple reason, you know, you start building something and then you start building this metro, and there's a lot of protest from people saying, hey, you are building this metro until X.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you extend it to this community one kilometer down the line?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that community happens to be perhaps the vote bank of the uh elected MLA or MP.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, you know, he feels that this would be a good idea to push it there because then these people will be happy and possibly vote in the next election, which means I can push it uh another kilometer or so, but that's going to cost me more money, right?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this is a very practical political consideration.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think all of these are moving targets.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to manage these projects in a conventional manner.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to look at flexibility in design, flexibility in budgeting, you know, managing these people, uh, stakeholders a little bit more effectively using you know things like social media and stuff like that, which I've written about and I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit, um, you know, and so on.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the bottom line is that we've got to do all of this in such a way that we are creating value, right?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: That should be our benchmark.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our benchmark is not that you know, once upon a time I said uh, you know, 60 lakh crore, right, without really getting into the details, and therefore you should hold me to account building this for 60 lakh crore.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, finally, when I looked at this metro, I found that the soil condition underneath Chennai City is because we are close to the coast, is so uh difficult to build in that it costs me a lot, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really my fault.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's a question of the soil condition, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: As my tunneling machine tunnels in, some heritage buildings are vibrating, right?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have to spend extra money.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than blaming me and saying, hey, you're a poor project manager, you're spending extra money.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: What we should be talking about is are we creating value?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right, with each of these interventions, which making it a little bit safer to tunnel underground, with you know, sort of stopping these vibrating heritage buildings from falling by providing this metro to that uh you know small you know underdeveloped area so that those people can now access the metro uh uh you know easily.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Are we creating value?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: So project management now moves away from the iron triangle to start looking at value.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can create Value, then you should uh sort of be happy that the project is going on, right?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Irrespective of whether you met your original cost and budget.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh on that uh note, as I was reading more about this, for example, today what I saw was you know there are close to about 414 projects where the cost overrun itself is close to about 4.33 lakh crores, right?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh even if you project manage it very well and you save 10%, it is almost like a 40,000 crore, which can fund a public health care initiative or some other initiative that is there.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: So when you really look at this kind of overruns, how do you really uh you know ensure that there is accountability and and how do you define value in a uh in a mega project?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh let me so two questions there, right?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do we uh account for these overruns and how do we define value?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: So on the overrun question, I mean, these are statistics, for instance, if anyone is interested, they can go to the Ministry of Statistics uh or the MOSPI, I think we call it, and they have all of these statistics on on project, and you can do all of this analysis.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've got to understand that this cost overrun is essentially when you say there's a cost overrun of thousand crores, it is the difference between the actual cost and the budgeted cost.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now the question is what is the budgeted cost?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: When did you budget it?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because, for instance, somebody can say, Um, hey, you know, I want to build 100 kilometers of a road, what will it cost me?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody else will say, roughly it'll probably cost you about seven crores a kilometer.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so you say, Okay, it's 700 crores.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then you go in and so you put one nail on the ground, you say 700 crore.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Then you go in and you find this road is not in some nice flat area, it's in a very hilly, mountainous area full of ravines, etc.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be a winding road, you know, it's somewhere in the northeast.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: You get your manpower and material there, it's going to be very difficult, etc.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: When you factor all of that in, it turns out that a reasonable value for that road is say 1000 crores, not 700.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, and you build it for 1000 crores.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: People will still say, hey, you said 700 then.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: You are uh taking 1000 crores to build it, you have a cost overrun of 300.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: But this is not really a cost overrun, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: You said something approximately, as you get into a project and more information comes up, you narrow down your estimate, right?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of psychological work that sort of said that human beings have this thing called the optimism bias, which means whenever you start talking about something, you're always likely to be more optimistic.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like saying, you know, I want a five-page essay, when can you write it?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: When can you finish it?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: You'll say, Oh, I don't have much to do this afternoon, I'll finish it by evening.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: But then only when you start writing, you say you realize that it's not so difficult.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time you finish, if you're optimistic, it might happen tonight, it might happen tomorrow morning.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: So projects are no different.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: When you start working on it, people are optimistic and they say 700 crores.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: But then once the data comes in, it actually is thousand crores.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then so you have to actually benchmark yourself against thousand crores, okay?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Which we don't do.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: These statistics unfortunately benchmark against the approximate estimate, not the actual estimate.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the actual overruns in many cases are lesser than what we perceive.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: But irrespective, right?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a mathematical game.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: The question is how do we create value?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: There are some techniques for this, right?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: So loosely we call them cost-benefit analysis techniques, right?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: So you can figure out from a project what is the cost.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm providing water supply to a village, there is a cost to it.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have to bring some pipe, I have to put a treatment plant, etc.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a benefit to the village.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: First, there is a direct economic benefit.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe those people are spending a lot of money getting water from somewhere now.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is now a savings.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Second, is they are probably falling ill quite a bit because they're just drinking um you know impure water from whatever local sources they have.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because they fall sick, they are unable to go to work, and these are all you know in villages, possibly daily wage earners.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so if they uh go with the existing system, they pay X amount in medical fees and lose Y amount in daily wage.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if now I have given them water, not only do they save paying on medical fees because they're not falling sick, but all of those days they're now able to earn.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we can actually quantify what are the benefits, both you know, financially, economically, socially, etc.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: There are techniques, there are, of course, there's a lot of debate about this, but I think that's sort of what we really need to look at.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: We really need to look at an economic cost-benefit analysis.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as your economic benefits are greater than your costs, I think you're better off, right?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you should be happy irrespective of whether there is a notional cost overrun or not.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: You also talked about the management of the stakeholders, and in one of your studies for a Metro Rail project, you really took out the advantage of use of social media in influencing the community, the citizens, the activists who are you know talking about the project.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, what was the learning that you had, and what would you recommend if a very large mega project is being built, especially in a country like India, where there's a lot of noise around mega projects?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: How do you use the role of social media to effectively influence and help people take decisions?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think uh so we did some interesting research.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had a PhD student who was partly with me, partly spent some time in Australia, um, and now is uh teaching at the at IIT Gohati who worked on this, uh, Johan Nynan.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of the credit goes to him for pushing this stream of work.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, what we what we realized is look, you've got to manage your stakeholders.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if your stakeholder is a vendor supplying cement, then you have a contract with that person and you can manage them through the contract.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can say, hey, if you don't supply good cement, I won't pay you whatever.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what about the residents nearby, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: What about the NGOs?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have a contract with them, they can say what they say, and in many cases it is their job to raise these kinds of uh questions.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: But you still and you have to listen to them, right?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't just unnecessarily trample the environment of society, but you also have to sort of convince them that what you're doing, you've got to take them along.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you take them along?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the old days, you did things like town hall meetings, right?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: You called all your stakeholders into a room, you tried to present, you tried to win their trust.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you did, sometimes people you know felt that you were showing pretty pictures, but your intent was different, you know, all of those kinds of things.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And for a regular project, maybe that's still possible.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you're building sort of an Anganwadi in your community, right, with a small community of, say, a thousand people, bring them all in.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: But again, going back to something like the Chennai Metro, which is being built in a city of Chennai, how are you going to bring all the citizens of Chennai who are all going to be affected by the metro in one way or the other, right, into a town hall?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just sort of impossible.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to start looking at technology to do this, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that uh you know, options like social media options like Twitter and Facebook and so on are really effective ways of reaching out to people.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, first, from a reaching out perspective, it's very important to use these sort of uh media sources.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Second, is how do you what do you do?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right, you just create a Facebook page and you just you know post some boring technical updates that an IAT civil engineer might understand, but nobody else would, right?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely makes uh no sense.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we realized if we started looking at uh this question of how do people influence one another, how do organizations influence one another?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we found there are broadly two categories.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: There is what we call the overt influence, where I might uh you know cajole you, threaten you, shout at you, whatever, I'll make you do what I want to do.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are very uh, you know, what we say covert or ways of doing it where I influence you almost at a subconscious level, right?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I almost try to get you to believe that what I'm doing is the right thing without me telling you that it's the right thing.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a concept that uh there's a French philosopher called Michael Foucault, called it governmentality, and he sort of uh you know was asking the question in terms of, you know, why do prisoners in prison, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Prisoners are like the worst people in society, right?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why do prisoners in prison behave in such a disciplined manner, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he sort of argued that the prison creates an environment which tells them that this is the way in which to behave, right?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, how how can organizations create an environment which convinces people that yes, what we are doing is right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's through, and social media and and Facebook and Twitter, etc., are ways of doing this.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, when we looked at the Chennai Metro, for instance, we found that you know they would uh uh you know they would sort of post a lot of things that shows their shows their care about the local community, right?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: So they they'd have these drawing competitions for kids on how the cityscape would look like post the metro, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and sort of uh publicize that widely widely on social media.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Pungal, right, which is of course very big here in the south, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Would be again something that they would really publicize widely on social media.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: So again, so now the community gets the feeling that, hey, this is now, as we say in Tamil, number metro, our metro, right?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, of course, they're standing for our values, they're helping our kids, etc.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps if I have to put up with a week of uh not being able to get out of my house because there's a big Twitter, maybe it's for the greater good, right?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I now have that mentality, as opposed to these guys are crooks, they're taking away all our money, all they do is put potholes in the road, the metro is not really going to help anyone.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you're sort of converting people from that sort of mindset to the more benevolent mindset through social media.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: And social media is not the only way of doing this.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you also have to walk the talk.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't just have wonderful social media posts and do something different on the ground.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's a big uh, as we as we say today, influencer.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think mega projects today can't just rely on I've got the best designs vetted by some wonderful designer where I am saving 20% of the reinforcing steel, and therefore you should congratulate me.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think they've got to sort of say, look, if we're creating value, let us bring that value to the people.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's come up with, let's have very active Facebook pages, Twitter pages, let's show people what we're doing, let's apologize in advance, for instance, about a road that is being cut and inconveniencing people, about noise that's keeping people away, uh awake in the night, but explain very transparently why that is required.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, all of this, you can write a technical paper on everything, but no one's going to read a technical paper.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Today, everyone's on Facebook, this, that, all the time.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I think social media is going to be an integral component of the outreach strategy, which itself is an integral component of the mega project management strategy.
• 32:25
  unknown: Okay.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I see all of that particular.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, do mega project teams have such teams who think on social media like this?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm kind of quite amazed the fact that there was a drawing competition done for the community.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: So is the are these teams now being set up for mega projects?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I think it it now it depends on projects, right?
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think the Chennai Metro actually has a, I wouldn't say a super active, but they have a Facebook presence and a Twitter presence.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the frequency of their posts is not uh, you know, uh is not three times a day or anything like that, but they actually have a presence.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do all mega projects have such presence?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is no.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you know, looking at what, and and we've seen examples of this elsewhere as well in Australia and the UK, where a lot of the influencing of citizens, um, right, because see, all of these projects tend to polarize people.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, people say, just take our own metro, just to stay on the same example.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of people who say, Why are you spending so many lakhs of crores on a metro when we already have a bus system and you get to strengthen the bus system, right?
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there are whereas there are others that are saying strengthen the bus system will get you so far, but if you want to go to the next level, you need sort of a better.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: These are debates that can go on and on, right?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and therefore the people who are against you in that debate are always likely to be polarized, uh, polarized.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there will always be people polarized uh towards the project.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And these kinds of uh you know strategies are things that, and so therefore, going forward, I would really like if you look at the mega project organization chart managing director or whatever, all the way downwards, it'd be really nice to see a social media manager, right, as one of the uh formal responsibilities that's uh that's given to the project, right?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that would be, I think, a really good step in that direction.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting, interesting suggestion.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: Ashwin, the other uh thing that I read about you really is you're a passionate believer in design thinking, and uh you brought in design thinking process for a slum develop redevelopment project where you use design thinking processes to influence and involve the community.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can you walk me through what was the conceptual thinking around it and how did you build this design thinking process into a project like that?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, yeah.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I'm not sure how many people are familiar with design thinking, and design thinking also has several variants, right?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, since I went to Stanford, Stanford as a as a design school, D school as they call it, they've got a particular variant, and so when I use design thinking, I typically refer to that.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the philosophy is that very often, um, if I need to uh, you know, there's a wonderful video that people can go and watch on the web of a company called IDO, IDEO, developing a shopping cart.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's a five-minute video.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, uh, if I if you went to an engineering college or went to a company and say develop a shopping cart, the uh knee-jerk reaction would be okay, right?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, what do we need the shopping cart for to shop, etc.?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's shut ourselves in the room because we're all super you know designers.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: We'll design something and then we'll come out and say, ta-da, here it is.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and the world has had a lot of experience with uh these kinds of uh uh you know approaches, where when they come out and say, ta-da, here it is, the person who's using this scratches their head and says, Look, it's nice, but this is not really what I wanted.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so uh and so design thinking sort of flips that on its head and says uh you know, you've got to uh uh you've got to really put yourselves in the shoes of people who are going to use this, really understand, right?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: First, so that you can start designing and don't shut yourself in a room, right?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Do what we call rapid prototyping.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you do uh I think that the the Stanford paradigm is sort of E D I P T or something like that.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: The first E is uh to sort of ethnograph or to really put yourself in people's shoes, you know, come up with a you know ideated design and then come up with prototypes that you test on people and say, is this what you want?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes these prototypes can't be the full thing.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: They can be, you know, models that are sketched, they can be thermocole models, they can be whatever, right?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Small, quick and dirty things.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: So people can like hold it, feel it, rotate it, try to see if this is actually what they what they want.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do that, then you're very likely to really understand people's concerns and design something that is not only useful, but is also being used.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: That is the big issue.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've designed something useful, but it is not being used, is the big refrain, right?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't want that, you want it to be useful and being used.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, you know, for instance, in the Sri Rangapatnam example, uh typical way of doing it is you know, there was some strump pre-development that needed to happen.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the typical way is some engineers to say, we are engineers, we know how to do this, we'll come up with a plan, right?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll optimize costs and build it.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we tried it that way, and the people from Sri Ranga Patnam said uh you know they weren't particularly happy with it.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: So then we actually had some of my students went and spent about eight months.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, not fully eight months there, but back and forth, and we had some NGOs were also helping us to try to figure out what these people really wanted, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, one of the things, for instance, that they really wanted was not so much concrete houses, but street lights, because safety was more important.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were okay with living the way they lived, right?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: But safety was more important.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that never really came out in the beginning.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: We designed in our first design nice concrete double-story houses for people, thinking they would all be very happy with this.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: They said, No, we want street lights, right?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: We want you know dustmiths because those are really what we are getting.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: So by spending about eight months, and then we use some visualization technology to come up with uh you know 3D models, right?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: And a variety of quick and dirty 3D models, uh, two things happened.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: One is we arrived at something, at a design, which is very different from the original one we did without talking to people, which people really liked.
• 38:09
  unknown: Right?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very clear that we actually got to something that they wanted to live in.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: But secondly, for the for the original design that we did, everyone just nodded their heads.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: For the one that they sort of participated in, they came and said, Look, if required, I will put in some equivalent of sweat equity, right?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: I can help build this.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if it is my house, I will be a laborer, right, for building it, etc.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: So they they actually had some ownership over uh the design, which probably means that it has a higher, these things have a higher chance of getting done.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if you watch that IDO video, you'll see the same thing.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see these guys going to the supermarket and doing all kinds of things, you know, figuring out ways in which the cart gets stuck right in the tight corner, uh, right, and things like that, bringing that back and coming up with hundreds of ideas, right?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally coming up with a prototype, which is, you know, when I when you see the final product is very different from what I thought would be like a shopping car.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the design thinking philosophy.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's applicable in a variety of situations.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I think you know, you could use literally design thinking for uh, you know, if you want to give somebody a gift, you can use the design thinking paradigm to figure out what would be a really nice gift to give to someone.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: So so you really believe what you did in Sri Ranga Patna, the fact that slum development is a priority for many governments using the design thinking process, because typically what happens is you do a slum development project, that place, as you rightly said, has got concrete and also sometimes is so dirty that you almost feel that there is no ownership.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you believe something like this can be taken up and used by multiple governments across the country, right?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely, and not just governments, right?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Private companies as well.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even in you know, take something like software development, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody comes and says, I want you to develop this for me.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you start with uh, you know, quick and dirty, okay, tell me what you want and let me go shut myself up in a room and come up with this uh with this uh program.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, even those kinds of situations, it's sort of important to look at it from a design thinking perspective.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's universally uh applicable.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: I tell my students that when they are planning the next uh intercollegiate festival, right?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we've not had it for the last year.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've had it online.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can use design thinking to really understand what would the students from other colleges want uh when they come into IIT Madras, can we do a few virtual prototypes and then decide what we're going to do this year rather than just keep three signs?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's not just governments, uh, I think it's a very uh powerful paradigm, but it's also difficult because it it involves you saying that despite you being a so-called expert, right, you cannot go and shut yourself in a room and design.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go and talk to people, right?
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: And at least as an engineer, uh right, you know, most engineers are, of course, highly introverted.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: My uh PhD advisor in the US used to tell this joke, says, How do you tell an extroverted engineer from an introverted one?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was the extroverted engineer is the one who's looking at your shoes when he's talking to you, right?
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or the introverted engineer looks at his shoes, this guy is a little bit better, he's looking at your shoes.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, and and talking to people is is difficult, right?
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's sort of and talking to people without putting ideas in their head is even more difficult.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: When my students try this, they go and say, Isn't this what you want?
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, No, no, you can't say that because you know then the guy gets scared, he says some IIT student is coming, I should say yes.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: How do you talk to them in an open-ended manner?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do you be part of that community, right?
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's it's difficult, but it's a very important paradigm to keep in mind.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and when it comes to mega projects, you are also a big believer in the leadership which is driving these projects.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw a very interesting study of the Nakpur Metro where you studied the leader.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what are the insights that you got out of that study?
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when you really do these mega projects, what are the tenets that the leader should have?
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so leadership is something that in some ways, um, particularly those of us working in project management, tend to understate because it's something that's that we feel is not replicable.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, you know, people feel that hey, leaders are somewhat charismatic people.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you uh if you say good projects will happen only if you have good leaders, then that's something that's outside your control, right?
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas all these other things, setting up a Facebook page, etc., is in my control.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: So let's focus more on things that people can control.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the truth of the matter is leadership becomes critical, and it's not just, I mean, I wrote about the Nagpur Metro, about Mr.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Bujesh Dikshit there, because I did not want to write about other projects where leaders have been written about.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: So Delhi Metro had uh Mr.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: East Ridaran, right?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was been written about many times.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there are other projects, and so I just wanted to sort of say, hey, there are others as well, right?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: India has a lot of leaders, and Mr.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Dikshit was exciting, a very charismatic leader.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think so that there are a couple of things that he did that were uh that were very interesting, right?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, first is you know, he is a bit of an interdisciplinary person, as he puts it himself, right?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, he was trained in civil engineering, but then he did a master's in economics and whatever.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: So he understands the project from multiple perspectives, not just a technical uh perspective.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is a very important uh trait of um of leaders.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, he obviously have pays a lot of uh attention to interpersonal relationships, to things like trust, to essentially ensuring that uh, you know, he has a, you know, it's it's you you can have, do you want to be on a team with the best players, or do you want to be on a winning team?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he sort of says, Look, you've got to be on a winning team.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need the best players, but everyone needs to sort of work as a team.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to sort of build that kind of uh kind of rapport.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think if you look at leaders across the world, and this and this this sort of study you talked about is a chapter in a book on leadership where mega project leaders from, I can't remember, 10 or 15 countries across the world have been profiled.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if anyone's interested in leadership, then you know they might want to take a look at that book.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you'll find that there are some similarities in terms of the interpersonal relationships that leaders have.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Interdisciplinarity, you know, their ability to take responsibility for decisions, therefore allowing their subordinates to work a little bit more freely, you know, their ability to make very sort of intelligent guesses about the future and try to stay up the organization there and so on.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think, but what we've also learned is that the reason we we came up with this book, and this is an international effort.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I contributed a study from India, but you know, there were people, I think the editors are from Australia and Norway and Germany, I think I can't remember, and Canada.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: Idea was to say leadership can also be learned, right?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't, you know, you're not just born a leader, you're not just this charismatic person.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that being interdisciplinary is something that if I know that that is critical, then I can go and take some courses in other areas and learn a little bit more about those as well, right?
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I think leadership uh can be learned, and what we hopefully would like to see is uh, you know, people sort of understanding these characteristics, training themselves over a period of time if you if you're weak in one of these elements to strengthen that.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you now have mega project managers who are very strong and powerful uh leaders because there's so many decision points that happen that unless you have strong leadership, right?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really, really difficult.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just go with the flow, right?
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to make uh you've got to make uh decisions.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Great, right?
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Great, it's a fantastic explanation.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: One of the other research work that you did was talking about the ecosystem of say the Chennai Metro water project initiative, which was there.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh you really talked about an integrated ecosystem for sustainability, where you said if you really wanted to design the water system, you need to look at land, water, and waste together.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, there was a very interesting concept of sustainability that you brought in.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as I was studying about this, Ashwin, what I found out was Indians by nature, you know, we waste about 42 liters of water a day.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: And uh at the other end, only 40% of Indians have access to water, right?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: So as you build and redesign the water management systems of cities and towns and villages, how do you bring in the integrated thinking concept at the same time build visibility and awareness with citizens on the redesign systems that you're thinking of?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a million-dollar question.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think we don't quite know of the complete answer to that because if we did, we'd have probably made a lot more progress.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: But see, I think the thing is there are certain things that are no-brainers, right?
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we waste too much of resources of all kinds, uh right, not just water.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, uh, you know, the whole reduce, reuse, and recycle mantra needs to be you know prominent in our thinking.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, with regards to water, today technology tells us that I can treat your uh waste water, whether it's from your bathroom or from your kitchen, uh, to a point where it is of portable quality, right?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as it's of portable quality, why are you concerned about where the water comes from?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, why can't we?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, and people there are studies that sort of say 80% of uh water that we use goes back into the system.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: We flush it down the toilet or we drain it down the kitchen sink, and 80% of that can be recovered, which means roughly about 65% of water can be put back into the system.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you give me 100 liters of water today, then tomorrow, 65 for my tomorrow's supply of 100, you only need to give me 35 new liters of water.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: 65 should come from into the system.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: But then look at uh you know how effective we will be.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: Where after supplying 100 the first day, every day I'm only supplying a further 35, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then I can supply to a lot of other people.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I think partly we need to sort of start getting into this mindset.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think technology is there, it's really more psychology, right?
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: The moment you tell me this is recycled water, then I just feel bad.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: But hey, I mean, if you go to Singapore, they've they've done an interesting thing, they've branded this as new water, okay, right?
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: So they and you can actually buy bottles, you can go there, they are even have a small uh logo, uh sort of a water droplet with eyes and whatever.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh 3% of the water that went into making that went from toilets, right?
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the water that you flushed and you flushed whatever you know down the toilet actually has made its way into that.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course, uh so partly I think it's uh so I think there are examples that the branding I think was key, calling it new water, uh right.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the fact that uh I think their former premier went on PV drinking it, so showed that you know this is perfectly fine.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there are things that we'll need to do.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one part of it, right?
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: To really get into this, what we call the circular economy kind of framework, and trying to sort of address this from a behavioral perspective, right?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: How can I and there's a lot of thinking now on behavioral economics and things like that?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: How can I use some of those ideas to help people nudge people towards behaving like this?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's one part of it.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the second part of it is what we found is you can't just deal with these in isolation.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to provide, let's say, you know, people say, hey, uh, there are too many homeless people, okay?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let's build uh you know a set of apartments for them.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: But now that you've spent set of built a set of apartments, you've got to supply them with water, and there is therefore going to be that 80% of that is going to come back as wastewater, which means you'll have to sort of treat all of that.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: So housing comes with a water and waste problem.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how do you treat all of this?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to put in some pipelines, taking them to some treatment plant, etc.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: Where do those pipelines go?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: They go under the road.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: So now you have to do a lot of road cutting, right, and leelaying, which means your transportation is being affected.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the point is just by saying I want some slum dwellers to have houses, you now have issues with housing, with water, with transportation, etc.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you can only do this by looking at this as an integrated system.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas very often we look at it piecemeal.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: We say, my job is to build 100 tenements, I'll build a hundred tenements.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the first day when it's inaugurated, it looks really nice and shiny, the paint is fresh.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: You come back a year later because you haven't taken into account the water, waste, and transport issues, right?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: The whole place has gone to the docs.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think partly reduce reuse recycle is one.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: And thinking of these as holistic systems rather than as individual elements is another.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of in the abstract.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: We are trying at IIT to build some simulations and some tools that will help decision makers decide, you know, how to work around all of this.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think it's still a work in progress.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: You also are one of the you know catalysts for the IIT and entrepreneurship cell.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: How are you kind of building the entrepreneurial mindset within IIT and what kind of ventures are you kind of seeding in the entrepreneurship cell?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um essentially, I think what we're trying to do is get our students to understand that A, they are, of course, quite talented, and therefore, I mean, and they are at an age where they get all sorts of crazy creative ideas, right?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: And to say, just go ahead and work on these, right?
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they are at a stage where they don't have families to take care of, they don't have mortgages to pay.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they can take a bit of a risk, right?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we're trying to sort of get them to think entrepreneurially, to sort of say, hey, think of something new, think of something innovative, and actually, you know what, don't just think about it and maybe win an intercollegiate competition somewhere, actually, go ahead and do this.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we've put together an ecosystem inside uh our campus.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh, you know, we call for interesting ideas, we give them a little bit of funding, we help them understand what the markets could be so that you know by the time they graduate, they have a reasonable idea of what uh whether their idea will work or not as a business.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if they have a if they are confident, then we have an incubator that provides them some funding and mentorship, and so we've got a bit of a of a pipeline.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what we are uh what essentially we're trying to do is to fill this pipeline is to encourage people to think, and people being not just students but also faculty.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: Say, hey, you're doing research, why does it just have to end up as a research paper?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: Can it not be productized as well?
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: So to encourage faculty and students to think entrepreneurially, trying to say, let's let me take a chance and see if I can, if I can make this.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: Part of that is catalyzed by the ecosystem around.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: When we started doing this, uh, you know, a lot of parents would get very upset and say, My son has studied so hard, or my daughter has studied so hard, they've got into IIT, they've got a good chance of getting a job with a big multinational company with a paycheck with several zeros, and you want them to become a penniless entrepreneur.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what kind of an idiot are you?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right, is the kind of you know questions we used to you used to face.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this poor kid will come and say, I'm really interested, but I can't go against my parents, what shall I do?
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: But now, given the overall buzz around entrepreneurship, right, uh everywhere in India, you know, people talk about Flipkart, they talk about this, swiggy, Zomato, whatever, etc.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that, so the ecosystem has helped us.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Second, is there's nothing like in college, like your seniors, right, doing this.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the moment now kids see that, okay, guys in third and fourth year are doing this, then from first, second year they start doing this as well.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, hopefully we have this sort of positive cycle.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: We don't necessarily prescribe what they want to work on, right?
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think anything is a good idea to start with if they can execute.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: But for some reason, and it's this is not by design, we tend to have people who are more interested in what we call deep technology.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there are relatively few people who are in sort of this app and you know e-commerce kind of space, but most people are looking at doing something in underwater robotics or uh, you know, uh electrical vehicles or electric vehicles or something like that, right?
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the kinds of companies.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have a if you if you go to our to the IIT Madras Incubation Sales website, right?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can see details of a lot of our companies, and you'll find that they're all over, but quite a bit quite a few of them are in the what we call the deep technology space.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you are also a big believer in STEM, right?
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Which is STEM-based education.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I did see some interesting videos of you analyzing the chess moves of Anand vis-a-vis uh, you know, the music that Anil plays, and therefore I found that to be an interesting uh jugal bandi, if I were to call it, of uh how you really uh put learning to practice.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, do you believe that uh a STEM-based education is something which is very critical uh in our uh kind of uh curriculum and environment?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, uh certainly, but I think STEM is sort of science technology.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it I think it doesn't necessarily have to be science technology, but I think what we were trying to do in that particular uh you know event as well as elsewhere is to sort of help people figure out how to think.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and that I think is is the is the way.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because when when we were growing up, uh right, and I was growing up going through school, you know, we were actually trained not to think.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you thought, uh, you were probably at a disadvantage, right?
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, you would be given so many questions to answer in a period of time.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you had sort of memorized it, you'd be able to do it very quickly.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't memorize it and you tried to think over the paper, and I remember a classmate of mine who you know went on to be ranked uh number 18 all India in the IAT JE, right, computer science, etc.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: He we had a test once in 12 standards, and he said, I'm not gonna memorize, I'm going to come and work it out.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of us memorized, and we did uh fantastically well in that test.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Either got full marks or one mark less.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: This guy, Fabi, because he didn't have, you know, the question was such that unless you memorized, you didn't have time in that 30 minutes to write it.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he understood it better than us, but he got really no credit for it, right?
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so that in some sense is the issue with the system.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, that then uh takes over later on in life.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's okay if you're just looking for marks to do that, but later on in life, when you have to stand on your two feet, you've got to learn to think, and that's where a lot of people get into trouble.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what we are trying to do, and I try to do this in my class as well, and the whole STEM-based education is to say, how can we get people to think right for themselves, so that once they understand how to think, then truly the you know, everyone thinks the IIT entrance exam is a very uh difficult exam.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's difficult only because people have this sort of rote mentality and are struggling to sort of change.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if you knew how to think, I assure you, the IIT entrance exam is a very easy exam, right?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you can figure out how to think, right, those questions, because they're all problems to be solved.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, really, I think to me, it's not so much STEM, but it's sort of teaching with the ability to uh to, I think too, if at the end of I don't care if the fellow knows learns nothing in my class about the subject matter.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if the person learned how to think while was a he or she was in my class and learned a little bit more about what they wanted to do or did not want to do, then that to me is the is the outcome I'm looking for.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant with uh 3D printing and uh the new technologies that are coming in in the construction and the building industry, what are you seeing the trends and its implications on a country like India?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because I just read that uh you know uh IIT Chennai did a 3D building in your campus, so I kind of picked that up.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: And how are you seeing this technology and its application in a country like India?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so 3D printing is one of a larger family of what we might call rapid construction technology.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the thing that's happening in India today is as I said earlier, we have a lot of things to build, but we are running out of material and we're running out of people, right?
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have the same labor force that you had uh in earlier years for a variety, excuse me, variety of reasons.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people are uh upwardly mobile.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people uh who used to be laborers, their children are no longer laborers, they've actually moved on to uh different kinds of jobs.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: So now in this scenario, when you don't have people, how are you actually going to build?
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to therefore automate, right?
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh automation is uh uh 3D printing is so lots of ways in which you can automate.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean you've got all kinds of robots and drones and artificial reality and virtual reality and things like that.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: And 3D printing is one such sort of uh way in which you can automate the development or creation of uh various beams and columns or whatever, quickly bring it to a site and sort of stack it up and and with relatively little labor and uh you know all of that, get get things done.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: So these are, of course, I think technologies of the future, and I think India needs to really start thinking seriously about these technologies.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, like you say, it's an interesting piece in the newspaper, it's a curiosity item, right?
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to start becoming mainstream.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: But having said that, you know, there is still some RD that is left, the costs are still possibly not comparable uh versus uh current you know conventional technologies, and so there is some research that we're doing uh in that area.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Partly, you know, a few years of RD will change that equation.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Partly we'll also have to look at government and whether they can look at policies that will uh that will enable these kinds of things and so on.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: But this kind of rapid uh you know construction, automated construction has to be the way of the future.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now for some uh personal questions, Ashwin.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: In your journey, which has been so successful, and from whatever I can see, the enthusiasm and the energy with which you speak, uh, what are the kind of books that have inspired you along this journey?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I uh you know, I never thought about it that way, right?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I read a lot, but a lot of my, you know, I I mean I so when I was in in high school and college, I used to read things like PG Wodhouse, right?
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: I used to read uh, you know, J I was a big fan of J.R.R.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, right?
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: And stuff like that.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: So and I I've read I've read fiction, nonfiction, you know, I these days I read uh things about uh genetics and about uh the you know history of humankind, and you know, I really like this book Sapiens that came out sometime ago.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: So all kinds, so I I mean I I I sort of like fiction, fantasy, uh, you know, science fiction, um, you know, common humor, etc.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I I I sort of pick up uh you know things from all of these.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think PG Wodehouse, for instance, puts you in a in a great mood, right?
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: Which which allows you to really sort of think freely and innovatively.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that I'm adapting anything from uh you know uh you know Wodehouse's book, but um, right.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, I think I really, you know, when you look at uh books on science fiction and fantasy, they just sort of explore possibilities that sort of make you feel that you know you can explore possibilities as well.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I don't think there's a particular book or a set of books that have really inspired me.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I actually have read relatively few books, apart from textbooks, on uh on on say mega projects.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that I know there are books on various kinds of projects, uh, right, that project managers write at the end.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: I actually haven't read as many of them, right?
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I've read all kinds of other stuff.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's just really broadening yourself out to all other kinds of experiences.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that inherent multidisciplinarity will sort of come to the fore at some point and allow you to think creatively, which is what research and entrepreneurship and mega project management are all about in some sense, right?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking out of the box.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: The other uh question I had and I used to ask many of my guests, and you are best uh positioned to answer this question is normally when you look at a doctor, uh, there is this whole continuous medical education that they need to go through year after year to keep up their professional practice, which is there.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: But for engineers, if you see after you finish your engineering, and when I look back, uh you know, I'm myself an engineer, and now you know, 30 years later, the what I read in my engineering and what is happening today are completely different.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do engineers practice continuous learning?
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: You are in a very brilliant position of learning every day, but how do you make the engineers of today be a continuous learner 20 years ahead, 30 years ahead?
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this is a great question.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are a couple of things that need to be done.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, of course, I mean, inherently those who want to learn will always learn, right?
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we leave that group out, okay?
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: But otherwise, see, if you look at these kinds of professions, if you look at medicine, if you look at architecture, if you look at accounting, all right, the the way they teach, they teach this almost as an apprenticeship, right?
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, as an accountant, you don't become an accountant until you have done that article ship, you've actually been part of an office.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: As a doctor, you do your residency, right?
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the inter the exchange between theory and practice is there right in the uh you know, right through the curriculum, and therefore people are ingrained that yes, these two go hand in hand, and therefore continuous learning is is important.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, if you look at an accountant, there are all these new regulations that come up and you're constantly on top of those going forward.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: Problem with engineering education traditionally has been is that we have compartmentalized the teaching part and the practice part.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: We've said four years of college, we don't even say internships, all of that are just sort of new ideas that are coming in.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: We've told people you study, then you go work.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this mentality, I think, is what is making it difficult because we have compartmentalized as a society.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think first we have to decompartmentalize, right?
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: And at IIT, we've been having these kinds of discussions.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: Should we look at, as other engineering colleges have done, right, a six-month apprenticeship period where people actually work at some point in the industry before they graduate, etc.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, many of these professions have um, you know, you have to continually be certified to be a part of that uh profession.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need to professionalize in engineering, right?
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in in the US, for instance, you have something called a PE license, a professional engineer's license, right?
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: And only a professional engineer can do, or someone with that license can do certain things.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: And to get that license and to keep it current, you've got to constantly learn.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, there is an incentive.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here in India, we don't have those systems.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, just like some other streams are professionalized, we need to start professionalizing engineering education over a long period of time, right?
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, there are, yeah, those are, I think, things that we really need to think seriously about.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is my final question, Ashwin.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you were to advise your 10-year-old self, what would be the three pieces of advice that you would give yourself?
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I doubt my 10-year-old self would listen to me.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have a 13-year-old son who doesn't listen to me at all.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let us uh so without uh with without wondering about whether that advice would be heeded, right?
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let me go back and say, so a couple of things I think I would say is one, don't look too far into the future, right?
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like I said, I never expected to end up being a faculty in IIT, I just ended up here, and all my plans that I had drawn up took me elsewhere, right?
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean it was fun drawing up those plans, but I think it's more important to live in the present and do things that you enjoy.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, to give an example, right now my son is obsessed with playing tennis, and he's a reasonably competent tennis player.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I've sort of said for the present, if that is what you're really passionate about, and as long as you're not completely compromising, failing your subjects and all of that, just follow that, right?
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just don't think too far ahead.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I think that would be uh number one.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the second, and this my 10-year-old self might not really understand, but I was told this a little bit later in life, and it made a lot of sense, is that you go through roughly two phases in life, an investment phase and a reaping that investment phase.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: And people normally think that investment phase finishes at 21.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you've invested in yourself by studying school, studying college.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now come on, reach that investment.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: But that investment phase actually goes through much longer, right?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: Even your initial days of working, etc., all of that is just an investment.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people today think of that as the time to reap investment.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: So to give you an example, you have a challenging opportunity which could allow you to grow.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: You have an opportunity where the first salary paid is twice as much as the other opportunity.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: Today everyone says, hey, this guy is paying me 2x, let me jump, right?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're looking at reaping your investment.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you're looking at continually investing yourself, you'd go in for the challenging opportunity.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think for a long period in your life, it's important to invest in yourself, right?
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think investing in yourself and not looking too far in the future, I think, are uh right.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a 10-year-old not eating too much chocolate and ice cream and remembering to brush your teeth would also be, I think, important pieces of advice that I would have given myself.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot, Ashwin.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic three pieces of advice, and it was really fun and great learning talking to you.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for taking your time, and this was a brilliant experience.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks, thanks, Bobby, and thanks for uh you know, for all the preparation.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think your questions were great, and a lot of the staff was interacted, and I think lots of great listeners would make it easier to talk.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah, so fantastic.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for putting this together.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think we enjoyed it.