Perhaps
I might be forgiven, being in the age group I am, for making a mountain of a
molehill and then considering the same as insurmountable. Imagine, therefore,
my surprise, a sense of magical exhilaration when the other day I decided and
was actually able to solve a simple household problem with a reasonable effort,
an action I held up for months.
While
in the above case the problem posed could be resolved to one’s satisfaction, I
am not sure that all kinds of small problems we face both in our day to day
lives and the ‘larger’ problems of life in the realms of technology,
environment, health as well as in the broader social, political, economic and
cultural contexts (subsuming some of our daily problems as particular
instantiations of the bigger issues) can always, in a general way, be shown to
possess happy or fair solutions. These may often be justifiably considered
intractable.
Health problems of an individual
It is a
common experience that some of the problems we face as individuals apparently
resolve themselves given sufficient time. There is a certain degree of
reversibility associated with some changes with respect to a particular
position or the condition of a given system (which our life has to deal with),
for instance, our body at any given instant. Changes do occur in our body or in
its behaviour. Sometimes one is barely conscious of these changes or almost
disregards these. On other occasions, however, these changes may be more
significant and it is possible that one perceives the changes as persistent and
feels uncertain about the consequences. That is when a problem with our body
might come to acquire a definition. But as experienced by many of us, quite a
few such apparent changes disappear on their own after a period, or if they
remain, are not quite noticeable and seemingly do not interfere with our daily
life. This does not mean that the problem has been resolved, but rather the
body has come to terms with the apparent changes in it and taken them in its
stride. It can be said to have graduated into a new steady state, may be termed
better or worse than the previous state. That is a matter of perception, a
subjective decision, but usually not calling for any action, a problem-solving
intervention.
There
are occasions, however, when the changes in one’s body may not be diagnosed as
benign. There may be a threat perception about an immediate breakdown of our
life or damage to its quality. The problem definition in such a case becomes
more urgent with greater specialised and professional inputs. Specific
solutions, mandating medically consistent actions and treatments might follow.
But it is not guaranteed in all cases that the solutions would be fully
satisfactory or would entirely or even partially resolve the problem(s)
originally posed.
The
main difference between the two cases above (pertaining to health problems of
an individual) is the apparent decisiveness and wherewithal to act with the
available medical means (scientific knowledge and technology) upon resolving a
problem in the latter case whereas in the former hope or faith in the
self-healing capacity of the body is in evidence leading to apparent inaction.
The outcome in either case may not conform to a uniquely definable ‘solution’,
but would be measured in terms of our expectation of what a solution in a given
case should look like.
Problems – scaling from individual to community levels
In the
household context, people continuously need to solve problems arising with
regard to selection, procurement of various gadgets and attending to a myriad
maintenance issues related to a number of appliances and procedures of routine
use for convenient, smooth and trouble-free conduct of daily chores. By the
same token, a cooperative housing society, a larger colony of residents with a
more or less homogeneous background, and finally a much larger and a more
diverse community living within the precincts of a municipality (municipal
corporation) might be required to solve qualitatively similar problems, though
not just with wider variability due to heterogeneity of the populace and their
requirements, but with a significantly higher scale that may sometimes call for
altogether different strategies and skills.
Guaranteed
equitable distribution of drinking water to all residents in a large housing
complex or a larger community and uninterrupted collection and environmentally
safe disposal of accumulated municipal solid waste are examples of two common
and pressing problems most cities in India face today, with no immediate and
reliable solution on the horizon. There are many more similar problems, such
as, public health, sanitation, air/water pollution, roads and efficient
drainage (especially for storm water), etc.
Water supply
Solid waste disposal
A different set of issues become pertinent in the context
of solid waste disposal problem. In this case the magnitude of the problem may
grow too big and its resolution may become quite intractable with the scale due
to the indecisiveness and procrastination (lack of urgency) on the part of the
people responsible for its management. Simple issues like segregation of waste
into dry and compostable wet garbage or separation of recyclable (such as
plastic, metallics) and electronic wastes, which are relatively easy to enforce
and implement at the level of individual household units within a residential
society, become many times more difficult, hazardous and expensive (if not
nearly impossible) to carry out if such a combined (unsegregated) mass of solid
waste from a large number of housing complexes are allowed to accumulate at a
municipal ward level. Choices among common treatment processes such as
composting, incineration, landfill and capping etc, can become orders of
magnitude difficult and ineffective, what with poor match between the feed
specification of some of these machines and the actual load, poor designs or
the inefficiency of the commercially available machines to be selected within
municipal funds restrictions. Thus the problem here is not just techno-economic
but also about planning and management.
No
matter whether it is a problem faced by an individual or by a collective, difficulties
in problem solving (making it an open-ended process) are
often associated with an inadequate or incomplete problem definition that may
happen sometime, in a typical real life scenario, due to lack of input
information required and the uncertainty in the data. The indecisiveness to act
in a way so as to move towards a solution may also occur when one has to make
choices among multiple solution strategies resulting in outcomes which, even
though include a good technically consistent solution to the original problem
but makes the solution less worthy either because of incurring too much expense
or for generating a new problem (like disposal of a byproduct).
Social and political over-determinants of problem-solving choices
An
important difference that pertains to this class of problems vis-à-vis the
problems faced by an individual household is the collaborative nature of
the problem solving in the sense that the decision making in this regard can
not be done individually. This might (usually, though not necessarily always)
bring into play the social and or even political determinants quite apart from
purely technical or technological considerations that would have decided the
course of action in an individual based problem-solving scenario.
However, it can be stated with
some certainty that delaying decisive actions, even at the risk of failures or
sub-optimal solutions, do not help in the long run and may actually compound
the problem. This has been amply demonstrated in the case of community wide
problem-solving by way of huge cost overruns and/or coming up with an outdated
solution designed for a certain assumed scale that may have seen an increase by
an order of magnitude during the pendency of the problem solving process.
