The Prime Minister should have accepted Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu’s offer to resign after two train accidents over four days. Railway Board Chairman Ashok Mittal has been relieved of his job after the Kaifiyat Express derailed on 23 August. Railway Board Member (Engineering) Aditya Mittal was among the senior officials sent on leave for the 19 August Utkal Express accident. Top officials must feel the heat for the situation to improve.
In Ashwani Lohani, the Railways has a new reform-minded chairman with the desire and drive to reorganise it along commercial lines. But he needs political backing. Prabhu cannot provide it. He lacks heft.
The Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Shipping, and Ports Nitin Gadkari has a lot more political clout and could give the cover the new Railway Board chairman needs from his minister.
Perhaps the portfolios could be combined into one ‘Surface Transport Ministry’.
Prabhu has made a lot of announcements. He has correctly identified under-investment as the reason for the Railways losing market share in freight. High-paying passengers have migrated to airlines, which are quicker and sometimes even offer cheaper fares.
A Rs 8.5 lakh crore investment plan has been made. Going beyond traditional sources of funding like the General Budget, the minister has tapped the Life Insurance Corporation for a loan of Rs 1.5 lakh crore on attractive terms. Rs 1 lakh crore is to be invested in station development. Private partners are supposed to bring in the money against rights to advertise and put up malls, hotels, and offices.
The contracts for development of Habibganj (Bhopal) and Gandhinagar (Gujarat) railway stations have been awarded. The minister’s Officer on Special Duty, Hanish Yadav, says contracts for 23 more stations will be given soon.
There is a programme to cut fuel costs in half, with aggressive electrification. This year’s electrification target is 4,000 km. The target for each of the following years is 6,000 km to achieve 90 percent electrification in the next few years.
The shift from cash-based to an accrual system of accounting will happen incrementally from next April, says Yadav.
There is a plan to upgrade the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes for speeds of 160 kilometres per hour going up to 200 kilometres per hour.
For this, the two corridors will have to be fenced, says Navin Kumar Shukla, Adviser, Mobility, who heads the cross-functional Mobility Directorate which was created in April last year.
All level crossings will have to be converted into underpasses or over-bridges on these two routes.
Drivers will have to be equipped to communicate with stations. The signalling and telecommunication equipment on these routes and on trains that run on them will have to be upgraded. When that happens, drivers will get messages about the speed they should maintain on different stretches; should they ignore the instructions, automatic brakes will be applied.
Heavier tracks will have to be laid to allow higher speeds. Contacts will not be awarded piecemeal like now. One contractor will do all the jobs (like signalling and track laying) on a stretch. The investment of Rs 18,000 cr has been tied up, Shukla says.
Alongside, there is a move to increase average speeds on the quadrilateral connecting the four mega-metros and the two diagonals between them.
This will mean deploying higher horsepower engines, reducing the weight of wagons, improving track geometry, eliminating stretches with permanent speed restrictions, installing diagnostic devices on tracks and trains to enable preventing maintenance, reducing downtime, installing twin pipe braking systems on good trains for quicker stops and starts, and making changes in operating practices.
These changes will be facilitated by the shift in a substantial share of the cargo now moving on the trunk routes to the Dedicated Freight Corridors which are expected to become operational from 2019.
Yadav, who was earlier with the management consultancy McKinsey & Co, says changes are not visible now; the results will show up from 2019 onwards.But the CEO of a multinational company which supplies equipment to the Railways is sceptical. "Don’t MAFIA,” he advises, which is a catchy way of saying one should not “Mistake Articulation For Intended Action”.
In the three years that Prabhu has been minister, the only big change that has happened, he says, is the awarding of contracts to GE and Alstom, respectively, for the diesel and electric locomotive factories at Marhaura and Madhepura (both in Bihar) respectively.
These are the first (and only) two foreign direct investment projects in the Indian Railways. There was stiff opposition to them from the railway bureaucracy, which deployed various stalling tactics. But the previous government did all the work for them.
Prabhu has also refrained from making grand announcements in his Budget speeches, the last of which he delivered in February 2016. Acting on a note prepared by NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy, he discontinued a 92-year tradition of presenting separate railway budgets.
These were occasions for railway ministers to ingratiate themselves to their voters and other lawmakers by announcing trains and projects that were often not profitable.
But the minister has not been able to shake up the railway bureaucracy.
He was thwarted in his efforts to appoint Sudhir Kumar, who was OSD to former Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, as his OSD. Kumar, an IAS officer, has intimate knowledge of the ways of the Railways bureaucracy and would have helped curb the rampant departmentalism that prevails.
Prabhu carries a reputation for honesty. He has delegated authority but critics say he should be more hands-on. He is writing two doctoral theses. But the time for academic analysis is over. The Railways need a mover and shaker. Nitin Gadkari is the man.
((This article was originally published on BloombergQuint. It has been republished with due permission. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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