The Railways and the sceptical me

Well I was just wondering why was I so much sceptical about the turn around story of Indian Railways probably the main reason being the public face of all this is a politician who doesnt find favours with the educated class. ( Oh yes I might not deserve but I still count myself as one) Had the person being a bureucrat or academician probably I would have been much more convinced.

Well few days back I got a chance to interact with Dr Goel a very senior figure with Railways and man behind E ticket / Tatkal , Ex MD IRCTC etc. I think the main benefit of being able to study at places like IIMs is you get a chance to meet people whom you would otherwise only meet from a distance of few meters.

There have been few interesting learnings:
Primary Ones:

• Railways is a pretty good business man (Humanizing railways)


• They are run by people who are fundamentally honest and talented


• The turn around story is for real.
  

Secondry Ones ( Tit bits of info):

• Palace on wheels is booked for Next 3 years


• During kargil war app 600 trains were diverted to western border in 48 hours


• Railways offer app 160 types of concessions


• The source of money is mainly freight business


• Strangely they don't have any monopoly in any business


• There variable cost in most cases is very less


• The growth in transportation is app 1.4 times that of GDP


• They are investing app 50K crore in developing a dedicated freight corridor


• They have been substantially able to control leakages because of computraization


• They actually have a well defined HR Policy for 1+ Million employee.
  

The railways turn around story:
Its for real
Some of the reasons behind it.

• The groundwork was prepared by previous minister


• Heavy investment in infra development was done previous to Mr Lalu


• They kind of legalized over loading. ( App 8% )


• 30% of seats were moved to tatkal


• They moved to aggressive dynamic pricing


• GDP grew and so did transportation


• They aggresively took lot of B to B initiative

Futuristic:

• They are trying to come up with a portal where the tickets will actually be auctioned.

These were just few of the tit bits, if you are interested in more just send me a mail will share with you the slides.

Tanay Anand
IIM Lucknow
Noida Campus