Suresh Prabhu, the newly appointed railway minister, believes in moving on the fasttrack so that he can meet the expectations of Prime Minister Modi on improving the railway’s performance. With an operating ratio at 92 per cent, only eight paise out of every rupee earned are available to finance railways’ growth.
This is not a happy state. As a result handouts are announced during the Rail Budget every year.
Undoubtedly, Mr Prabhu’s first task would be to extricate the nation’s economic lifeline from the deep fiscal hole his worthy predecessors have buried it into over the last two decades or so, with hundreds of financially unviable projects — 406 at the last count, costing Rs 1.85 lakh crore — stuck in the pipeline. He also has to take care of a long wishlist of high-tech ventures like bullet trains, world-class stations and a few less expensive ones like providing Wi-Fi at railway stations and in super-fast trains etc. FDI and PPP may be needed for these expensive ventures.
Mr Prabhu’s solution to untie the Gordian knot of the Railway Board’s decision making process is to simply cut through it and by delegating tasks to the operating-level like general managers of zonal railways, production units and other entities. Being virtual CEOs of their domains, the scourge of so-called departmentalism and roadblocks set by vendor or contractor lobbies will hopefully end, or they will have minimal impact, thereby ensuring that there are few impediments in the execution of projects.
E. Sreedharan, India’s “Metro Man”, has been roped in as a one-man committee to suggest a system to ensure transparency at the GM and other levels. He has to prepare a manual of instructions to be followed, including a MIS for the time-bound completion of all commercial projects. If required, he may co-opt any other person and may even recommend a professional organisation that can be engaged to provide an end-to-end solution to this process. The timeframe for submission of an interim report is two weeks and for the final report three months. This is enough for someone like Mr Sreedharan, who knows the way railway bureaucracy functions.
Mr Sreedharan has an impeccable track record of over 50 years of managing complex civil engineering railway projects. He retired as member, engineering, Railway Board before moving out to head Konkan Railway Corporation (KRC) and finally as the CEO of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. At KRC, Mr Sreedharan perfected the strategy of first short listing contractors to keep fly-by-night operators and their political supporters at bay. He also set performance targets for half-a-dozen chief project managers on the 760 km-long line from Roha near Mumbai to Mangalore Central to simultaneously undertake work on their sections. This led to timely completion of the KRC project, which now needs to be replicated with the Railways.
Improving safety and punctuality will continue to engage Mr Prabhu’s attention, while he faces a never-ending list of requests from MPs and MLAs for new trains, new lines to develop backward areas and stops for superfast trains at small stations etc. The dilemma of according priority to passenger or freight will continue to trouble him. Perhaps, if he realises that carrying passengers is a losing proposition, he will try to improve the bottomline by placing a cap on new trains. This will allow the profitable freight business more room to grow. Recent reports suggest that passenger volumes have already started to peak.
Early completion of the western and eastern legs of the dedicated freight corridor, the former speeding up transport of export-bound containers from the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and north India, and the latter to reach much-needed coal to power plants in Punjab, Haryana and UP, new coal lines to evacuate coal, improved port connectivity, doubling, etc. would enhance the railway’s freight capability helping it to reach two billion tonnes a year within the next decade.
The writer is a former member of the Railway Board
