Engineering ! A Chain of Thoughts on Vishwakarma Day !

 Engineering ! A Chain of Thoughts on Vishwakarma Day !

Dinesh K Kapila

Vishwakarma Puja is celebrated in Punjab after Diwali. Unlike other states where it is around August or September.

Vishwakarma Puja is a festival that honors the birth anniversary of Bhagwan Vishwakarma, the god of creation and architecture. It is a day to celebrate craftsmanship, creativity, and skilled labor.

In Durgapur, at the Durgapur Steel Plant of SAIL, where I started my career in 1983, we used to welcome this festival as it meant the hot headed trade unions would cool down and spare us the gheraos (surrounding us and shouting slogans and not even getting to go to the loo at times) and bandhs and cribbing about overtime or acting promotions for the leave reserve or just about the food. Maybe the hot months contributed to taking some time off for trade union activities! But once Vishwakarma Puja was upon us, we could look forward to comparative days of serenity as then it would lead upto Durga Puja and then Diwali / Lakshmi Puja. One year in HR in hard core Plant Industrial Relations and you knew the calendar for the year !! Including that you would sleep on the office table during a bandh (work stoppage as a mass) and watching the Communist and Congress party affiliated unions outdo each other on blocking buses or opening the way. And eating at times buns with rasagolla syrup in the morning with sweet tea as that was all there was at times to eat at the various staff canteens! And those not on strike and inside the factory would do their own share of sloganeering in the morning - once I and a senior overslept and missed the sloganeering at 5 am in the morning and we got a rather hot load of a mouthful from the Plant Personnel Manager.

To come back from where my mind suddenly wandered off, Vishwakarma Puja in Punjab means Devotees offer prayers at their workplaces and refrain from using tools on this day. After the puja, people come together to enjoy a feast. It is celebrated by craftsmen, engineers, and architects who seek blessings for their tools and success in their fields. My own driver, Gurcharan, he is the inspiration for this chain of thoughts and recollections. I was gathering up the earthen Diyas which we had lit up at night and he drove up on his mobike (motorcycle) and I suddenly realised he would pray today and clean up the cars, the last fifteen or maybe eighteen years he has been faithfully undertaking this Puja.

Our country, specially my beloved state, Punjab, needs a strong base of manufacturing and this will only come about once we value intrinsically the process of working with our hands and valuing craftsmanship and engineering. The strong social biases we have for office jobs and desk related activities as against skill based jobs in manufacturing or repairs or maintenance are a major barrier, a pertinent issue we refuse to acknowledge.

The Head of HR of a major Indian Pharma Company met me recently. He said if he advertised even by word of mouth for a job in sales, he would have a long line outside his offices but for skilled based jobs in the factory, where they even tried telling parents at villages they would train up the youngsters, there was a tepid response. The State he works in is not Punjab but this is the reality.

If you value the artisan, the craftsman, the mechanic, the plumber, the electrician, the foreman, the charge man, the biases will gradually fade away to some extent. But will we do so.

Even in Agriculture, experts from Spain, The Netherlands and Israel pointed out one fact, when in Punjab and Haryana visiting farms they would ask a farmer if the soil was moist or sandy, the farmers and their sons would ask a labourer to come and dip his fingers and then to explain. The idea was to put a distance from the manual part of the work. During interviews, mock or otherwise, I have asked youngsters with a good engineering qualification, why they wanted to be bankers or in insurance or development banking. Many said the production line was not for them and more so the social recognition was more for a guy in marketing or sales or finance rather than in operations or manufacturing.

The legions of SDOs and Executive Engineers and SE’s and Chief Engineers we employ in the Government have also contributed to this rather skewed bias. Their Engineering is more desk oriented and less field oriented. The young students in the cities and towns want exactly that profile in their jobs after earning a qualification in Engineering. When parents visiting Durgapur would come to know the sheer number of engineers employed in the various departments, they would be disappointed. If a Chargeman would ask what could his child do after Class Twelve, to answer an Apprentice, was a crime, to say even the NDA (National Defence Academy) or the Army as a Jawan (soldier) was strict no, but any position in the State Government, in any Office, was the best. No wonder the Engineering is just a pathway to a MBA and preferably a job in consulting. Or the coveted civil services.

By the way just how many temples have an idol of Vishwakarma Ji. Hardly any. This itself is the bias. Panchkula next to Chandigarh, I think has one such temple. That is the stark fact. Meanwhile Gurcharan is polishing up the cars and his tools and having his tea and sweets. I can only pray and hope we will be overcoming our inherent biases in the years to come.