Recently, some of us friends were having a discussion about corruption and how it got started by someone taking a shortcut and came across an interesting analogy.

In engineering, we have a concept called ‘Technical Debt’ which means when you make poor design choices or take code shortcuts, the system will become very difficult to maintain which will increase software entropy.

So broadly, this debt is something which accumulates interest and increases the entropy of system further. Thermodynamics say that any system with high entropy is disordered.

If I put all this in a social sense, any time you take a shortcut to get your work done, the country becomes a little more unstable. That time when you paid a 100 bucks to the police officer for your passport verification, you increased the entropy. That other time you paid a government employee so that you can skip the license test or you threw that empty juce box on the road, you raised entropy.

Sure, you are just one citizen but still you are increasing this social debt.

The causes for this debt are also exactly the same as the causes for technical debt.

• Business Pressure
• Lack of process or understanding
• Lack of flexibility
• Lack of proper tests
• Lack of documentation
• Lack of collaboration
• Lack of knowledge
• Lack of refactoring

The current status of our bureaucracy can be described in programming terms as a big ball of mud — haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, a quagmire.

As an evolving program is continually changed, its complexity, reflecting deteriorating structure, increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.

Obviously, there is no easy solution to this. But what I know is how to reduce technical debt. We need to have transparency, collaboration, agile processes, automatic tests and sustainable,adaptable structure. May be we can translate his technical process into a social context and solve this insolvency.

The first step to reduce software entropy is to stop writing crappy code.
The first step to reduce civil entropy is to stop taking crappy road.