How many times have you repaired you toaster, washing machine or TV set? India?s is not a use and throw culture; the repairman tinkering with whatever?s gone wrong is a familiar sight; nobody questions why some equipment starts malfunctioning so soon. In fact discarding any device for technology obsolescence is unheard of, except in recent times when acquiring added features in mobile phones has become a craze. Of course the wife over 35 years or old parents happily gets the old phone, so why use and throw?

Heterogeneous usage practices: The erratic, unpredictable touch points of our heterogeneous billion on consumer durables are a veritable nightmare for service wings of home electronic product companies. The crux here is heterogeneous behaviour and usage. The simple drawing of electric power can be in a plug point with or without a switch, by sticking wires inside an open power source or illegally pulling a line from an electric pole. When load shedding happens, sometimes for over 12 hours, people resort to diesel generators or low voltage inverters where sine waves are not pure. With no homogenous usage practice in the same equipment by different people, or mishandling domestic appliances, is it any wonder that high breakage and technical failures are commonplace here?

Heavy consumer durables called white goods, like refrigerator, washing machines, stoves, and light electronic durables called brown goods, like TV sets, digital media players and computers, all face harsh and demanding situations because people have innumerable ways of using them. The famous example is a Punjab roadside dhaba making lassi in a washing machine. Aside from the functional part there?s voltage leakage, switches reversed, too many buttons to push on the product or the remote. Products designed overseas work beautifully there but miserably fail in India. Who can read the fine English print in product manual? A few companies try to customise using Hindi, but when India has 22 recognised languages and thousands of dialects, what should product companies do? Let?s take a look at some technical woes too.

Fluctuations galore: Unpredictable power fluctuations and punishing weather conditions make products ready for repair sooner than later. Equipment in India can face zero degree in winter, 46 degrees in summer and 95% humidity during monsoon in coastal areas. The failure rate of the same product in a developed country is one third that of India. Our unique cumbersome conditions include varying mains supply that?s supposed to be 240 volts. The Bureau of Indian Standards says +6% and -15% is acceptable, that is 207V to 253V variation. In reality, that?s not true. Interiors of all states will vouch that it can drop to 120V or fall below 100V. If your house is close to a power station, you can get 270V, under fault conditions even up to 300V.

Developed countries operate under controlled temperature and humidity conditions with room heating in winter and air conditioning in summer. Their products designed for 240V with ?10% tolerance face no problem with consistently correct power supply. Unless equipment for India are designed to withstand operating voltage ranging 120V to 265V, there will be no let up for service requirements. The mains frequency also drops to even 46 Hz from 50 Hz. A 1980s story goes that an MNC introduced its largest selling in Europe clock model in India, but it would run slow an hour a day. The 4% reduction in mains frequency caused 4% error every 24 hours. The company recalled its clock radios and made them based on quartz crystal.

Power blackouts: A large number of mostly semi-urban businesses run by dragging power illegally, but authorised by bribed electric servicemen. So it should not have surprised us that excessive loads on power stations led to the Northern Grid collapse in July 2012. India?s blackout was the largest power outage in history affecting over 620 million people, spread across 22 Indian states.

No servicing mentality: Problems are compounded as India believes in extracting longevity in every product by repairing it again and again. With five years warranty, the products are supposed to be serviced for at least seven years. So stocking spares incurs a huge cost for manufacturers. If products are sourced from China, you?ll get 1% free spares with the order. That works just fine for developed countries where small appliances are never repaired, rather replaced due to technology obsolescence even if they work perfectly. India?s failure rate is more than 1% per year, and customers expect appliance maintenance for a longer period. So many companies end up having more employees in their all India service divisions than in all other functions put together. Spares management can be quite frightening logistically.

Hiring service personnel is just as nightmarish due to our social shilly-shally. I was amazed to find that very often service equals to slavery, at best a lower caste job. Service personnel, commonly with low education and even less soft skills, are barely given much respect when they arrive for repairs. They have to deal with demanding, fuming customers who have paid good money for appliances not working. Middle-class parents generally discourage their children from service jobs, even high-flying ones in airlines and hotels. Workers don?t like to publicly be at the beck and call of others who are not directly paying their salaries. The main reason for not doing door-to-door service work is that it has very low value consideration for marriage.

Actually if our unemployed youth can overcome social hesitation, heterogeneous product repair service provides great scope for business. Companies can easily train them to work as entrepreneurs. It would reduce the strain on their service wings and help generate new jobs.

The bottomline of neglect and missed opportunity is in not designing new styles of products for a heterogeneous society?s special requirement. No company, either Indian or international, has created relevant affordable products like handy tools specifically tailored for livelihood generation. This remains a greenfield area to explore, new digital-tech techniques to exploit, and provide benefit for heterogeneous millions to enjoy what modernisation should provide.

Shombit Sengupta is an international consultant to top managements on differentiating business strategy with execution excellence

(www.shiningconsulting.com)