Impartiality: The Secret of Success

The 10th Asian Games were held in Seoul, South Korea, in September 1986. In this 16-day competition, South Korea bagged the highest tally of medals. The details are given below:

So between them China, Korea and Japan bagged the lion’s share of the total medals. India is a far bigger and a more populous country than South Korea, yet this chart shows that India lagged very far behind Korea. Commenting on this, The Indian Express of October 6, 1986, writes:

‘The Koreans used a computer to select their athletes and spent one million dollars to train them for each discipline for two years. India used familiar hit-or-miss methods in which the old malady of parochialism and nepotism may not have been at a total discount.’

To cut a long story short, the Koreans selected their competitors on the basis of talent whereas India selected people who were well-connected. How different the final outcome could have been if India had done as Korea did, and had simply fed the necessary data about the potential participants into a computer and allowed the selection to be made with the total disinterestedness and mechanical impartiality that only a computer is capable of.