Asia Inc

 

DRESSED IN a traditional white Indian kurta, the silver-haired Lalu Prasad, India’s railways minister, stands out among the standing-room-only crowd in the auditorium at Insead’s Singapore campus. Sitting next to him is Sudhir Kumar, a senior ministry official.

Together, the minister (popularly called “Lalu”) and Kumar are no strangers to the lecterns of academic institutions. They’ve also shared the story of the near-legendary turnaround of Indian Railways with audiences and visitors from the halls of Wharton, Oxford, Columbia and many others.

 

“Indian Railways is what we call a Jersey cow. It was almost killed, it was not given good food, it wasn’t being properly taken care of and it wasn’t even milked regularly,” says the soft-spoken, Hindi-speaking Prasad, using one of his favourite metaphors, while addressing the crowd of faculty members, students and other members of the academic and business community, who sat entertained and enthralled for more than an hour.

Indian Railways, run by the country’s railway ministry, is the oldest railway network in Asia — 400 people boarded the first passenger service in 1853, for the 34km ride from Mumbai to Thane. 

 

Today, the system is a 63,000km-long network, with some 7,000 stations. It is among the world’s largest employers, with some 1.4 million people on its active payroll and a further 1.1 million pensioners that it needs to take care of. It carries some 17 million people daily and images of its passengers hanging off the doors or sitting on the carriage roofs are famous the world over. One million tonnes of iron ore, oil and all kinds of cargo are carried every day. The system is rightly called “the lifeline of India”. 

The audience that day, just like others before it, was not there to hear Prasad talk about the fine art of cow milking. Rather, it was there to learn about the dramatic turnaround under his leadership that brought the railway back from almost certain bankruptcy to a cash surplus last year of 25,000 crore rupees, or some $6 billion, on 16% growth in revenue to $18.2 billion. For the current FY ending March 2009, the ministry, described by Prasad as “a unique mega enterprise”, aims to boosts its revenue higher to $19.2 billion. 

“He has become ‘Professor’ Lalu because of this $6 billion,” quips Kumar, a member of the 1982 cohort of the Indian Administrative Service — the pinnacle of the country’s bureaucracy. Kumar’s rather unassuming official title is “Officer on Special Duty”.

 In his ministry’s budget speech in February this year, Prasad said: “We take pride in the fact that our achievement… makes us better than most of the Fortune 500 companies in the world. We are taking Indian Railways to unprecedented heights.”