Welcome to the republic of randomness: Annotated commentary on India's glorious lack of standardisation

Time of India

22-04-2025

V. Raghunathan is a former Director of the Schulich School of Business (India Program), York University, Toronto, a former professor at IIM Ahmedabad and a former President of ING Vysya Bank. A prolific author, he has written over 15 books, including the national bestseller Games Indians Play (Penguin). With more than 600 published papers and articles, his latest books include The Lion, The Admiral, and A Cat Called B. Uma Vijaylakshmi (Westland, 2025) and To Every Parent; To Every Child (Penguin, 2025) and Irrationally Rational: 10 Nobel Laureates Script the Story of Behavioural Economics (Penguin 2022), among others. LESS ... MORE
Welcome to Incredible India—where everything works… as an enduring proof that God exists and has a sense of humour. This is a country where the plug rarely fits the socket, the tap threads seldom align with the pipe, and the city you're in today may have an entirely new name by next weekend. But please—don't be rigid or unimaginative. Who needs dull predictability and boring uniformity and standardisation when one can have chaos, colour, and the constant thrill of the unknown?
We may have big dreams of 'making in India' or fantasise about slipping into the manufacturing shoes China may one day leave behind, but we can't seem to standardise a single thing to save our lives. Take, for instance, our electrical plugs. No two plugs seem to agree on what a 'standard' socket should be. You'll find two-pin, three-pin, round pin, flat pin, and slanted pin—as if the entire system was designed by a committee that never met. Plug in your phone charger, then stand perfectly still while holding it at just the right angle, silently praying that your breathing won't dislodge the tenuous connection. It's less a question of elementary engineering and more of yogic posture—for both the plug and the user.
Let's now consider our taps. Shower knobs may rotate clockwise, anti-clockwise and hot water is sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right giving you in all four permutations. Changing a tap may mean replacing your pipeline, or vice versa, because tap threads are not standardised and are therefore not compatible with thread fasteners and connectors.
Then comes the joy of building a home. Fancy constructing a room with neat right angles? Good luck. Bricks and tiles come in gloriously random sizes—each supplier's own personal vision of what 'standard' might be. Even the most geometrically sound plan can end up looking like Picasso's take on architecture. Precast concrete? Prefab walls? Cute. Here, infrastructure is often artisanal: a lone man with a plastic mug and a bucket, lovingly splashing water over a gunny-sack-covered flyover pillar. No standard operating procedures here, just muscle memory and divine intervention.
Vehicle number plates in India are another realm of expressive freedom. Fonts, colours, plate sizes, screw placements, and vertical or horizontal alignment all lie in the hands of the owner—or his local sticker guy. It's where artistic liberty meets regulatory shrug. Sure, rules exist. But enforcement is, like many other things in India, 'flexible', like the side we drive on.
We are, after all, the land of jugaad—our celebrated national doctrine of improvisation. It is innovative, flexible, and delightfully chaotic. Unfortunately, it also allows us to sidestep systems and standards that actually function. Why build a reliable, standardised structure when you can come up with temporary fixes forever?
Public transport is an excellent showcase. Our buses are as varied as our festivals. Sizes, designs, door placements, and floor heights differ not only between states but often within the same city. Route numbers follow no logical sequence. Destination boards can be in English, in local scripts, or completely absent. Ticketing systems range from tiny paper slips to QR codes, depending on the conductor's mood or the decade the depot was built. Bus stops too are a visual adventure—steel shelters, streetlight poles, and imaginary stops only in the whims of the driver and or the imagination of the passengers.
Trains? Where to begin? Yes, India has multiple gauges due to colonial legacies and geography. But platform heights vary wildly—even within the same zone—transforming boarding into a feat of athleticism. Train coaches lack uniformity in design and comfort. Numbering systems are inconsistent, announcements temperamental, and signage whimsical. Timetables serve more as hints than commitments. And while we trumpet our digitisation efforts, ticketing platforms offer a masterclass in confusion. Each railway zone seems to have its own dialect of dysfunction. Safety systems differ across zones, and ticketing interfaces vary online and offline. It's a transport network held together not by uniformity, but by jugaad, patience, and sheer human determination.
Then we come to roads, where the lack of standardisation becomes a public health hazard. Traffic signals, where they exist, are mere advisory tips. Lane markings are faded doodles, U-turns crop up in the most illogical places, and even busy crossings can often be dangerous, unscientific, and escapable only if you're lucky. One-way service roads are often merrily driven in both directions. And road signs are a matter of whim as to when and where they may crop up, with no dependability.
Electricity is equally enlightening, or flickeringly so. In the high-tech capital of Karnataka, Bengaluru—India's own Silicon Valley—the power supply flickers so frequently you might think the grid is sponsored by a strobe-light manufacturer. Voltage fluctuations are the standard, power cuts among the few constants, and load-shedding timetables (or any other kinds of timetables) remain mysteriously absent. Electricity is not so much about standardised power generation but the generation of vague suggestions.
Our cities are proud celebrations of spontaneous growth—organic, chaotic, and defiantly unplanned. Roads are rarely parallel, their orientation so arbitrary that North, South, East, or West have little meaning in our geographies. Intersections are accidental, streets mostly unnamed, and addresses more of a riddle than a location. Navigation relies on landmarks—often ones that no longer exist. Unsurprisingly, GPS apps routinely give up, sending you on wild goose chases or leading you to the back wall of your destination. In a country allergic to standardisation, even coordinates lack coordination.
But woe betide you if you use an old city name. Say 'Bangalore' instead of 'Bengaluru,' or 'Allahabad' instead of 'Prayagraj,' or 'Ahmedabad' instead of 'Karanavati' and you may trigger a cultural backlash. Names change, maps evolve, but potholes, open drains, and overflowing dumpsters remain remarkably consistent in their lack of maintenance.
The bureaucracy, of course, is the crown jewel of randomness. You might think Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar project has standardised identity. Think again. Every agency demands fresh KYC, proof of age, address, education, income, religion, ancestry, and probably your blood type. Multiple passport-sized photos, rubber stamps, notarised copies, and the unshakeable faith that you remembered all six documents they didn't mention. For added efficiency, an 'agent' lurks nearby to expedite your misery—for a goodly fee.
Even Digital India is a victim of our national allergy to standardisation. Yes, there are thousands of Apps, and you can scan a QR code to buy peanuts from a roadside cart. But try getting a digital land record, a death certificate, or filing a grievance online, and you'll enter a Kafkaesque maze. Government portals crash, cybercrime units are ornamental, and online complaint systems are largely symbolic. Official email addresses either bounce back or fall into a digital coma. The only reliable standard? You won't get a reply.
Rules? Our legal system treats them like those Terms and Conditions we all click 'Accept' on—existing, but irrelevant. Helmets are sold with fake ISI marks for Rs. 150. Police procedures depend on the day, the officer's mood, or the accused's surname. Bail is a roulette wheel. Justice is a charmingly unpredictable theatre.
Unlike China, we don't bother with standardising rail gauges, city layouts, or school curricula. Instead, we focus on renaming cities, building statues, and choreographing drone shows. Nation-building here is not about quality of life—it's about quantity of spectacle.
Even free speech, supposedly a constitutional right, suffers from India's deeper malaise: the absence of standardisation. You can technically say anything you want—but only if it doesn't touch religion, caste, cows, history, nationalism, the ruling party, or, heaven forbid, reality. The boundaries of what's permissible shift like sand dunes in a storm. Ask the wrong question—say, how the Prime Minister maintains a couture-level wardrobe on a modest public salary—and you risk arrest, a sedition label, or even a bulldozer visit to your home. (Of course, you can't really ask him directly—he doesn't grant press interviews.) The rules of expression, like most things here, are selectively applied, inconsistently enforced, and perfectly unstandardised.
And yet, amid all this randomness, one thing is standardised—our festive spirit. We may lack standardisation in firecracker safety, water treatment or hardness, or garbage segregation, but come Diwali, Eid, or Christmas, housing society WhatsApp groups light up in perfect synchrony. You can be certain that multilingual greetings will pour in with clockwork cheer, accompanied by 47 emojis and animated GIFs. Never mind the absence of civic discipline—'Happy Ganesh Chaturthi!' will arrive right on cue. It's chaos, yes, but with a dependable rhythm. A sort of emotional standardisation, if you like.
And so, we march forward—awkwardly, inefficiently, often hilariously. Sandwiched between nostalgia and hyper-nationalism. Powered by jugaad, guided by luck, held together with faith and duct tape. We may not have working sockets, but we do have an impressive variety of failures—each more inventive than the last.
But don't worry. Everything's under control. Mostly. Kind of. And when it's not, well, we have a phrase for that too.
'Chalta hai.'
That shrug. That half-smile. That lullaby of resignation. It explains everything, excuses everything, and fixes nothing. After all, it's far easier to dismiss those who raise such issues as unpatriotic—and then let the trolling take care of the rest.
But hey, at least we're never bored.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.