Random || Disparity

Amazed at the disparity that I saw today, or rather, noticed today...

So I work in an organization where I am a part of the training team of some kind. The procedure is that at the end of the training we perform a sort of a test of all the trainees. This test is ideally of a duration of 4 hours, but usually, it takes everyone roughly 8 hours to complete the test; Not because our evaluation of time is bad, but because those who are new to the skill usually take time to sort out all sorts of errors and come up with the final result.

Anyway, in the past 2 months, I've taken 4 such sessions. The first was a session of MBA grads - all managers and all, and no matter how diverse and smart the lot was, it took them around 8 hours (the usual) to finish the test. Then came 2 batches ... one was the IITians, and the second were the others. While testing the IITians, all of us were shocked to see that the person who finished first had wrapped up everything in 2.5 hours (:-o), while the other batch was facing a wagon full of troubles. One fellow had even walked up to the trainers and said that if he passes the test, it would not be because of his skill/hard work, and that would trouble his conscience. And today came the 4th batch. Today, on the last day, despite the fact that my session was supposed to last 2-3 hours, it went on for 5 hours as I ended up revising almost all the previous sessions. I'm amazed at the kind of difference that I saw.

Next, while coming back home, I glanced at the digital rate list put up at a petrol pump and saw that petrol was around Rs 70, while diesel was around Rs 40. And here we are, in this nation, where we keep talking about reducing the carbon footprint, reducing pollution, etc and this is the situation. For those who do not know why people prefer to drive petrol cars than diesel cars, it is so because the diesel fumes are more polluting than petrol fumes. That is the reason why companies prefer to manufacture more petrol cars than diesel cars. So if this is the reason, why is the diesel price lower than the petrol price? Shouldn't the diesel price be higher than that of petrol so as to discourage all those using diesel cars? Yes, ideally, that should be the case. However, I wish to ask our dear government what do they intend to do by behaving in such a manner. In a nation where a state's high court is passing an order to convert all petrol/diesel cars to CNG so as to reduce the pollution, the capital's region has this kind of disparity when it comes to fuels.