Turnaround strategies usually entail a lot of blood, break many eggs. But in the case of the Indian Railways, the political mandate was to ‘turn around the financial health of the Railways without imposing any burden on the common man’. In other words, ‘serve an omelette without breaking any eggs whatsoever’. How this seemingly impossible task has been carried out is by now common knowledge.

Despite the reduction in passenger fares of all classes, the Railways during 2007-08 generated a historic cash surplus of Rs 25,000 crore and the operating ratio improved to 76 per cent, the best ever in the last four decades. It lays to rest sceptics who six years ago assumed the Railways cannot regain financial health without fundamental restructuring and downsizing.

The sceptics argue that the ‘so-called turnaround’ is driven by ‘plucking low hanging fruits’ in a booming economy and soon it will all be over. We have no doubt in our mind that the scope for innovations in systems, processes, policies and technology is endless. The strategy of getting maximum bang with the same buck can continue to work wonders for the Railways for years to come. The Railways proved the critics wrong once again in 2007-08 by sustaining double digit growth in traffic earnings for the fourth consecutive year.

We should not forget that the Chinese Railways has only a slightly bigger network than the Indian Railways. While the two railways have equal number of passenger km, the freight throughput of the Chinese Railways is five times higher than that of the Indian Railways. As against 140 trains in China, we run only 70-80 trains per day on a double line track. This is just one example of the immense untapped potential of the Indian Railways. We can also augment the system’s capacity at low cost within a period of three to four years by use of advanced signalling and communication systems.

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