“In Bihar, fifth bridge collapses in a week”. “Canopy crash at airport kills one” in Delhi. These are headlines from late June. In Mumbai a few months before, we read of the collapse of an advertising hoarding, killing 17 people. When will such killings stop? We do not hear of them happening with such frequency in other countries.

The truth is that civil engineering has been on the decline since Independence. At that time, civil was the first choice of students entering engineering colleges, ahead of mechanical, electrical and metallurgical. Today it is the last choice. The reason is simple. Salaries for civil engineers are lower than those in the other engineering disciplines.

The reason for that is also simple. The government is the biggest client for civil engineering works, the building of infrastructure that is fundamental to development. Its procurement policies in regard to design of these projects have inspired private players to follow suit: choose the cheapest designer, not the one who delivers higher quality and better value for money in terms of total project costs. So designers in this country are competing with each other in terms of who can quote the lowest fee, not who can deliver the best quality.

Salaries are bound to decline and quality suffers because it is no longer relevant in securing commissions.

In selecting designers, the government makes a farcical pretence that quality matters by following the “80:20” rule. This says that in selecting consultants 80% marks will be based on quality, and 20% on the fee. “Quality” is divided into a number of sub-categories such as financial capacity of the firm, number of employees and so on, with not much attention paid to the firm’s earlier achievements or how satisfied earlier clients have been with its performance.

Any firm that achieves less than 65 marks on the quality scale is rejected as being unsuitable. So the client finishes up with a short list of firms that have between 65 and perhaps 75 marks on the quality scale, the maximum marks on the quality scale being 80.

On the financial scale, the lowest bidder gets 20 marks. Everyone else’s marks are 20 divided by the proportion of their fee to the lowest bidder’s fee. So if anyone quotes half the correct fee, he can be sure his 20 marks compared to 10 for the correct bidder when added to the quality marks will assure him of the project. Quoting low is thus the key to success. So designers are competing with each other not in regard to who can deliver the best quality but who can quote the lowest fee.

Unfortunately there is an increasing tendency in government projects to make design part of the contractor’s responsibility. Contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, so the contractor is bound to go with the cheapest designer he can find. Quality is even more emphatically irrelevant.

The World Bank used to have a very intelligent process for consultant selection. Consultants were asked to submit their offers in two separate, sealed envelopes, one containing their qualifications and project design proposals, the other their fee.

The technical bids were first opened, and consultants ranked on the basis of quality alone. The financial offer of the best consultant was opened and the quoted fee negotiated. If the client found it unacceptable, this offer was closed, and the financial bed of the next best consultant opened.

If fee negotiations here also failed, the process was continued but – and this is critical – the client was not allowed to go back to the first consultant. This ensured that the client was reasonable in the course of negotiations. Financial bids of all unsuccessful consultants were returned unopened.

For whatever reason, this procedure was given up and the World Bank supported the 80:20 scheme. This incidentally favours Western consultants over Indian ones because of the manner of quality ranking giving weightage to such factors as headcount of employees or financial strength.

Imagine surgeons being selected on the basis of who quotes the lowest fee. Or even by an 80:20 selection process? Or lawyers being so selected? Would the quality of surgery and legal services not decline over time?

The same applies to the civil engineering profession. Until government changes its procurement policies nothing will change, and in any case it will take decades to recover from the damage already done to the profession. Cities will continue to flood, bridges to fall and roofs to collapse, all unnecessarily, until we rectify this.

The author is a civil engineer and urban planner, one of the three authors who suggested the idea of Navi Mumbai.