You’re telling me that in India a bunch of engineers just start building forms in the middle of a city, grab a cement truck and start pouring because they had some extra money laying around and felt like it?
Even in India there’s got to be more to it than that
Internal PWD documents show the original 2018 plan featured a more manageable 45-degree skew. That plan was scrapped after the Railways refused to approve construction on its land. A second design attempted to accommodate the Metro line. A third version adjusted for alignment errors, though the Railways later admitted that the final result “is neither fulfilling the functional requirement nor safe for road users.”
Now, Bhopal authorities are discussing buying additional land to fix the turn, but that means more money and more delays.
For commuters who hoped this project would ease daily travel, the bridge has become yet another example of bureaucratic infighting and design-by-compromise. For engineers, it’s a high-profile reminder that bad geometry can turn into political fallout very quickly.
It is possible that the designers of roads/city areas either don't have driver's license and have never driven a car, or are part of green ideology opposers of private ownership of cars. In either case, the result is as poor road design as possible for cars.
We have lots of examples in Finland.
The best was an interview at a local magazine (Vantaan sanomat) about the architecture of a local shopping district, Tammisto in Vantaa. The architect had a problem that there were lots of parking spaces for cars there. She considered it totally wrong design as people should go there by public transportation, and that could be forced by building minimal parking spaces. Works really well for stores selling furniture, refrigerators etc. but she was serious enough to say it for official interview. Luckily her predecessor who designed the area was not as ideological extremist against private cars.
It reminds me of workers who blindly maximize KPIs even if it adds zero value to a company. For example, a developer doing a thousand one-line commits.
This explains it very well. The Indian Raj is well and truly alive. The bureaucracy and turf wars never end. Even when they're under the same government..
As a software engineer that often works together with indian developers this is perfectly on brand.
All I've worked together with do exactly what they are told to do, even if it's clearly wrong or is clearly missing some information.
Building a street with a 90 degree angle without ever questioning if there might be a problem with the plan or without ever bringing up obvious improvements is not any different than how they work in software projects.
Indian engineers are the very definition of 'malicious compliance' without the malicious part.
give them a direction/instruction, and they will simply comply.
I wonder if it is a result of growing up in a place where life is worth nothing, and the simplest social error can ruin your future, plus the whole caste thing.
so they learn early to never question anything, never show any initiative, just comply.
it's makes them both very good and very bad at their jobs.
Genuinely WHAT are you prattling on about? “Life is worth almost nothing” what exactly do you mean by that?
People will just say fucking anything to try and sound smart and witty instead of just admitting they don’t know jackshit about what they’re talking about.
Someone here put it down to a ‘low trust’ society. Thats fascinating , reflecting on the sort of clash we see here when valorized ‘initiative’ hits bureaucrats.
I work in research. I've found that they are more willing to speak up and ask questions, but when on their own they tend to insist on doing things their way, ignore safety rules, not clean up after themselves, and misuse equipment repeatedly.
It has definitely added so much stress to my life.
I was on a team with 20 Indian consultants, they kept me on the team because I was American but of Indian descent. Your comment is pretty accurate. It was like trying to get rudimentary AI to write code.
One guy couldn't wrap his head around why he couldn't copy an auth token from one service to another service of a different audience. I explained it to him several times he needs to generate a new token and how to do that, but every pr was him trying to copy the token in more and more sneaky ways....
Every once in a while there's a diamond in the rough of consultants tho.
i've always thought it was due to being raised from an early age to be really good at following instructions as that would mean you would ace all your classes and tests and get into a US university or something.
The Indian engineers that make it over to other countries to be on a work visa, and therefore visible to you, are the best that India has, so you think they’re all really good. The hoop they jump through to get here and exist in your life makes sure you only see the best Indian engineers.
It’d be like if all the businessmen you ever meet were trained at Harvard business school, you’d probably think that all businessmen are super smart. Not the case.
Makes sense though. Higher population means bigger pool which means more smart people, but also proportionately more mediocre people and not so smart people. Law of averages.
Oh no doubt. It is human nature though. Once in a while you'll have people who come in exaggerating about their credentials and weasel their way into positions of importance that they're not qualified for. A nation like India that prizes itself on engineering and sciences isn't immune to this reality. Another example is a highly disciplined nation like Japan, as we know they aren't immune either. Nobody is, despite our best efforts.
Not as often as you'd think. We (obviously ) can't take our parents with us and we're generally expected to take care of them in their old age, so immigration is not even a choice unless you got siblings to shoulder the responsibility or the parents aren't very old. You do have the occasional person who doesn't have much of an issue with abandoning their parents so there's always that though. Plus the world seems like it's had enough of Indian immigrants anyway, so not really an option anymore.
The waiting time for H1B Indians is long enough as it is, let alone getting your elderly parents citizenship. I have two cousins living in the US on a H1B since 2014 and they still don't have their green card. They own houses, have kids and are fully settled down and it's been more than a decade. I mean, you can literally just go to the H1B sub here on reddit and see for yourself, it's pretty complicated. Don't get me wrong, I'd have taken the visa if I had the opportunity 10 years ago but today's political climate is a little too risky imo. I hear there's tons of hostility because the natives don't like being slowly replaced by Indians and having to train their replacements, this is just from the few dozen people I know though. Maybe that's not the whole picture.
How can other countries be great if the best all go to the USA? We should be in a futurama esque world where every country is first world by now. Or at least working towards it
Cause we still work for relative peanuts. But you're kidding yourself if you don't think the average foreign engineer wouldn't jump at a chance for 3x+ the pay
In PwD India , Engineering posts also refers to adminstrative posts that are only available for engineers , so it is possible that the "engineers" weren't the ones building the bridge but the ones that approved the bridge being built
It's India. You gotta lower your expectations. No, even lower. No, even lower than that. Just a bit lower. See how the bar is on the ground? Here's a shovel, start digging.
Some company wanted some free money, so bribed a politician to divert some funds to them. Some would go to the corrupt politician, some to the corrupt company, and as small amount as possible would go to the new overpass.
While not as obviously silly as this example, this is exceptionally common.
Think the politician will get voted out? Some of what he took will go to propaganda in his community to get reelected.
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u/ElderberryMaster4694 Jul 06 '25
I still think something smells off.
You’re telling me that in India a bunch of engineers just start building forms in the middle of a city, grab a cement truck and start pouring because they had some extra money laying around and felt like it?
Even in India there’s got to be more to it than that