Whenever fiascos such as #NEET2026 happens one always reflects – why do such things happen? Why so repeatedly? In the famed classic Silappadikkaram, the Pandya Raja gives up his life the moment he realizes he was wrong in putting Kovalan to death on an allegation that is proven wrong. His, knowing her contribution to her husband’s wrong action, gives up her life too. That’s a long way from where we are. We are far away from that reality. There is a need to bring back value for institutional legacy and excellence which requires a reflection on why it is suffering in the first place.
For continued excellence and legacy in any thing 4 elements have to come together in resonance-
- System and its Architecture
- Service and Policy
- Process/Procedural System
- People
In our times, there is a lot of importance given to the first three. Excellence is imagined primarily as a consequence of the System, Service and Process (SSP)- the inanimate objects. People are imagined as somebody who must live up to the first three or raise themselves continuously upto that through hardwork. Otherwise, the SSP should be robust enough to overcome any limitation on the part of the people. The genius of the People is in carving the SSP robust, delivery is a secondary accomplishment. The relation and dependency between them is not even called out conceptually to identify a healthy configuration for efficient delivery.
While it is the People who man the SPP, and deliver the execution of the policy, their alignment with the SPP is significantly underinvested in. People and their alignment with the SPP has 2 components
- Their Skill alignment
- Their Personal alignment
Institutions clearly recognize the former. Every institution anchors in continuous skill development at multiple levels. But personal alignment is an underinvested area.
The Personal readiness can be assessed at 4 levels
- Desire and Pleasure
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- Do they have the Desire to deliver excellence?
- Are they deriving Pleasure in their performance?
- Need and Existence
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- How much of their Personal life benefits from this excellence?
- Order and Sustenance
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- Do they genuinely appreciate the value excellence brings to the institution, community, nation and their order?
- Do they see the value an institutional legacy of excellence?
- Fulfillment and Transformation
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- Do they seek fulfillment in this excellence?
- Do they seek a personal transformation through the excellence?
Thus, beyond skill-readiness human beings could be aligned to a context/work at 4 levels. This alignment is called Swadharma in Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). At the minimum #Swadharma is just having natural skills for performance. At maximum #Swadharma is an alignment of the individual with a performance at the level of Desire, Need, Order and Transformation. In IKS there is a term for this – the #Purushartha – Kama, Artha, Dharma, Moksha.
It is always easy to assess the skill-readiness of a person. But, a structured, systematised, deterministic assessment of Swadharma ie., a measurement of one’s Purushartha resonance with the work context is difficult. There are two ways possible.
- The Leadership of any Program should be with the representatives of the fraternity who are practising it. Purushartha alignment will be somewhat natural. People within the practising fraternity have a natural propensity/tendency to own a program end to end.
- The Institutional Leadership recognizes the value in this assessment and,
- Develops an eye for intuitively grasping at what level the alignment is.
- Makes an attempt to always choose the best alignment among the available.
Either way, at the very least, the Institutional Leadership must eliminate those who merely have a personal desire to move up the ladder through this performance without any institutional desire. That is the lowest end of the desire anchored only in the selfish part of the self. A career orientation without legacy orientation is dangerous. A desire to perform well with an end-to-end ownership of delivery is the basic minimum desire expected in the realm of public service.
In a System purely designed for mere operational excellence, the desire to perform well aka substantive excellence/legacy will become a casualty. As Operational Excellence becomes more important it tends towards overindulge in the procedure. It results in a double whammy of inefficiency through procedural overindulgence and loss of perspective of excellence on the substance/domain side. There will be steady climbing down of the value chain to a point from where no resurrection is possible. Substantive excellence requires individual alignment i.e., Swadharma alignment. There is a reason why all leadership emphasis in Indian texts (such as Mahabharata and Arthashastra) demand Indriyavijaya at the highest end. Indriyavijaya is possible only if there is Swadharma alignment. The latter is the starting point that moves in the direction of Indriyavijaya. When you have absolute control over your senses you are not only incorruptible you will also be absolutely intolerant of any corruption. When your own senses are craving for attention their fulfillment blurs all decision making. Even if we lack the ambition for absolute excellence at the far end of Indriyavijaya we cannot abdicate our gaze on the starting point – Swadharma alignment failing which is only a free fall into the wrong end of personal desire.
If People don’t have the right psychological alignment with the System and Process, no Service will be delivered well. Building a great legacy and living up to an existing one should matter to them at one of the four levels of Desire, Need, Order and Spirituality. If the success of something matters to one spiritually then, even with lower capability, one might strive to ensure high quality. That is Swadharma alignment. The number of times NEET has failed makes one wonder if there is anybody within the NTA with any level of Swadharma alignment with the institutional role and excellence. For a nation that is delivering complex elections, a Kumbha Mela etc., the NEET fiasco is a contradiction of a civilization scale.
Feature Image Credit: istockphoto.com
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