How Do Indian Engineers Become Pawns to Perpetuate Corruption in India?

First thing first. Is this assumption or thought right? By any chance, do the Indian working engineers help in perpetuating corruption in India? Would it be right to assume that Indian engineers are generally corrupt? 

It is important to keep in mind that India is one of the leading nations in the world as perceived by the so-called corruption perception index (CPI) devised by transparency international, the premier corruption watchdog agency in the world.

Being an engineer who has worked more than three and a half decades in the Indian industry, I would say Indian engineers are essentially Indian first and have all the good and bad characteristics that any average Indian has.

From the core, my country men (and women) are not generally bad. They are essentially good people. What they lack is the courage to withstand or resist bad elements in the society. And those with hardcore antisocial characteristics are just a meager minority! Yet, the majority good people are not in a position to resist the evil designs of the few who cunningly force their vested interests with ease!

This is not any thing special to India alone. It is a worldwide phenomena and it happens every where and has been happening.

To be an honest and good citizen what is essentially needed is good education and good family backgrounds that ensure cultured upbringing. Unfortunately, India as of now has not achieved such a level of development. More than half of Indians even in this modern times live in utter poverty and conditions that can be better described as uncivilized. It is simply stupid to think that the conditions of India with regard to human development could match with those of the developed worlds.

But those who have been educated and trained as engineers ought to be different. They should be leaders and agents for fast forward progress of their society. If that is not happening and the engineers themselves are becoming anti-socials in some manner, it is something to be worried about.

Most young engineers have a dream, a dream to achieve and do something good for the society. They all have some potential to do big things happen for the nation. But soon they find the nation and the society at odds with their thoughts and abilities. They soon realize challenges beyond their capacity to overcome. And those challenges are things that they have never been told about during their engineering education!

Their engineering education was simply some practical science and nothing more. They were supposed to learn real engineering practice at the organization where their services are hired under the able guidance of the senior and experienced engineers. 

The first shock many young engineers face in India would be the organisational politics and the manner in which brilliant engineers have been side tracked to utter disillusion. 

They are left with not many choices. Either they have to fall in line with the existing system which is firmly under the control of a few of their seniors who have fully diverted their energies to non-engineering skills of achieving the so-called career success and personal achievements or align with those once-brilliant and professional engineers who have been side tracked in the organization as mere dead-woods!

Soon the cycle repeats and India remains as a perpetual underdeveloped nation behind the perpetual developed nations.

As this cycle repeats, India as a nation suffers and the Indian working conditions become worse as the time passes.

Fortunately, the progressive Indian private sector companies are not following this trend in general. As the success of the Indian private sector business wholly depends on their collective competency, good private sector companies are exceptions and engineers in those companies might be finding professionally satisfying work environment for most part of their career. But again they exist and operate in India and they cannot possibly escape from the economic guerrilla warfare they had to face from the Indian political environment which sustains the Indian governance. That forces the best private sector engineers to soon transform themselves as clever managers and manipulators rather than being professional engineers, as they grow in their respective careers!

Even the best engineer soon loses his or her professional enthusiasm to stick to ethical practices. They find it easy and rewarding to be unethical rather than being honest and ethical. A good engineer cannot be good CEO in India simply because his or her engineering skills and knowledge are not what is important to succeed in business in this country! If that is the case, then what is the use of engineering skill and knowledge? 

No wonder then that the companies and organizations in India look for half cooked engineers from premier engineering institutes with some additional soft skill training from premier management institutes to be picked up with hefty pay packages to be ultimately trained as cunning and clever organisational manipulators who are well suited to fit the corrupt working environment that India provides! 

The rest of the Indian engineers soon become technically trained clerical staff who are willing to do any kind of work for a living. If they are in real engineering, that could well be as technology procuring clerks who are too willing to write their technical texts the way their bosses desire. For being unprofessional, they are better rewarded in several ways.

There is no need to elaborate this. There could be exceptions here and there. But on the whole, India is not a country for good engineers to work professionally satisfying their inner self.

No wonder then that the best Indian engineers prefer to migrate and yell out for India from silicon valleys elsewhere!

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