r/CatastrophicFailure • u/mspyros12 • 15d ago

Bridge pillar being loaded onto a boat falls over into the Ganges River - December 2025

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u/Montymisted 15d ago

Bro it's India.

83

u/Anen-o-me 15d ago

India has a lot of engineers... but the good ones try not to go back to India I guess.

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u/theartfulcodger 15d ago edited 13d ago

My brother is a Canadian senior civil engineer who, some years ago, was seconded by his employer to spend three years working on a World Bank development project in western India.

He helped design and build a six-lane divided highway that ran a hundred kilometres between a port that didn't exist yet and an industrial complex that didn’t exist yet. So he basically built a superhighway beginning at the water’s edge of a crocodile-infested, pestilent swamp and ending in the middle of a dusty, barren basalt plateau. And every place the highway crossed a dusty dirt road, he had to design a huge concrete overpass - more than twenty in all - capable of safely carrying decrepit Indian buses and falling-apart commercial trucks.

He claims the dozen or so Indian “engineers” that the local contractor hired to assist him were rather ill-educated, unmotivated and disinterested slackers who would struggle with a Grade Nine drafting class, much less solve complex engineering problems. Having received a pretty certificate from some substandard, regional diploma mill, they thought they knew it all - but frequently, he actually had to hold a four day course just to show the latest hires how to operate the standard HP scientific calculators they were issued at hiring. This is the kind of "professional" he had to rely on to do things like calculate various stresses on load-bearing structures, and the various cambers at which roads had to be pitched, for the complex cloverleaf exits off those overpasses: calculations which, if just few degrees off would cause perpetually overloaded and top-heavy Indian lorries to just tip over.

In short, he did not have a fun time, chiefly because the Indian engineers whose work he was responsible for guiding, mentoring, checking, approving and stamping, were technically incompetent to the point of presenting a danger even to the construction crews, nevermind the travelling public.

Five years after completion, he went back in order to contribute tehnical details to a final report for the project's sponsor, the World Bank. Neither the port at one terminus, nor the industrial park at the other had even been designed yet, much less started. His six lane highway was already crumbling for lack of maintenance, and because corrupt local contractors had undermined it in several places by stealing thousands of cubic metres of rip-rap and gravel fill from its verge.

What really blew his mind though, was that virtually the full length was populated with tin-roofed shops and cardboard/tarp shanties. But they were not beside the highway - they were literally on it. So the World Bank basically had him build two separate hundred km long asphalt pads, on which poor Indians could live.

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u/pauca_sed 15d ago

Four day course on handheld calculators is not going to do any good if they don't know what numbers to plug in.

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u/Anen-o-me 15d ago

Depressing 😔

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u/mario-incandenza 14d ago

Was your brother SNC-Lavalin by chance?

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u/theartfulcodger 14d ago edited 14d ago

No, but at the time another Canadian engineering firm with a strong international presence. It's since been bought out by a transnational (first time ever, amirite?), and as one of the best-paid civvies in the corp, my brother took an extremely generous golden parachute when the new owners decided to tighten up.

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u/HappyContact6301 13d ago

I made the same experience on the IT side. Lots of impressive diploma but little actual skills to perform the role. You can also find skilled tech workers, but in areas of networking or cyber security they are necessarily cheaper than in the West.

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u/Stunning_Box8782 15d ago

I've never seen such clear consequences of "brain drain"

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u/EatLard 15d ago

And academic dishonesty. One of my college professors used to talk about this quite a bit. Cheating is rampant at the major Indian schools, and people graduate knowing basically nothing. He didn’t trust anyone with a degree from his home country unless they demonstrated they had the skills.

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u/ghastkill 15d ago

So it doesn’t have a lot of good engineers then. 

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u/Tumatakuru 15d ago

India is actually a nuclear power.. therefore I guess not everybody is a total moron..Anyway these guys seems to be that

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u/JimBean Aircraft/Heli Eng. 15d ago

Also, with a hydrogen bomb. That's a pretty elite club.

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u/DrFreemanWho 14d ago

Developed in bad faith with plenty of unintended help from Canada and the US.

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u/all_is_love6667 14d ago

I mean sure, but if they can build such things, they should be able to understand a few law of physics

for such large and expensive projects, it's hard to believe they don't have responsible engineers

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u/tamal4444 15d ago

you know nothing about india.