It’s difficult to even imagine, leave alone believe, that the Indian Railways, a Rs 54,700 crore giant, lumbering since 1996, has turned around over the past two years. What turnaround? The stations suck, the trains stink and let’s not even begin to talk about service. Yes, it’s difficult to visualise this turnaround. But if that’s difficult, let me increase the degree of difficulty the turnaround has been, and is being, driven by Lalu Prasad, the man accused of driving Bihar aground, single-handedly.

Writing this story has been a challenging task. All sorts of biases, based on subjective inference of the public face of a rustic leader, creep in. The only option we had, therefore, was to look through perceptions and stick to facts arguably a good starting point. But after we got the facts, we questioned them, put them through a rigorous crunching exercise, analysed them, placed them in perspective. It might sound defeatist had it not been inspiring (as all turnaround stories are), but here’s the story in four bullets:

• The turnaround of the Railways is real, touchable and backed by record-breaking figures. It has been a journey in which the first station was freight earnings — which is what we have largely captured in this edition of Express Survey (See page 2). The next stop will focus on turning passenger losses into earnings and make a rail journey a pleasant experience. The last station of this turnaround trip is approaching fast—allowing private players to run container traffic (See page 3) and the Rs 65,000 crore freight corridor (See page 6) that will come up over the next six or seven years. It is then that this turnaround will climax.

... contd.