Bloodless coup underway to reform railways: Prabhu

Bloodless coup underway to reform railways: Prabhu

New Delhi: There is a “bloodless coup” underway in the Indian Railways that’s altering the organization in fundamental ways but without the glare or the pain that a formally labelled restructuring exercise would entail, says Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu.

Responding to criticism that he has shied away from making largescale transformational changes in an organisation that has for long been defined by many as slothful, unwieldy and inefficient, Prabhu said he had chosen to be pragmatic rather than dramatic while at the same time seeking to achieve big results.

He told in an interview ahead of the Modi government’s first anniversary that he did not fancy fighting “1 lakh people” only to achieve something small for notching up a Harvard case study . “I am saying I want to do a bloodless coup without doing that,” he said, adding he preferred quiet reforms rather than big-bang ones that ran into a storm of protests. Prabhu, a banker-turned-professional politician who was picked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to run the railway ministry in November 2014, presented his maiden railway budget in February . Several experts said that while he brought in a technocrat’s focus to fix the organization’s many problems, he had proposed little by way of bold steps.

However, the railway minister said he was restructuring the Railway Board in his own way and these were fundamental and far-reaching. “From delegating powers from me to the Railway Board, to the GMs…Railway Board has already become an organization that will deal with policy by definition,” he said.

This is something that several railway committees had recommended but successive ministers never got down to implementing. Prabhu said he had even delegated his own administrative powers to Minister of State Manoj Sinha, leaving himself free to handle the big picture and oversee policy implementation. He also noted that the delegation of powers had ensured the corridors of Rail Bhavan were free of people trying to influence contracts and favours.

Granting more autonomy

Prabhu said he had already signed MoUs with two railway zones, “giving them autonomy and letting them function accordingly”. He added that he did not want to use labels such as `restructuring’ as “the word” will become controversial.

He said the process of creating a railway regulator had begun and economist Arvind Panagariya and others were working on it. “E-tendering has already started. We are creating a completely integrated IT platform that can be monitored on realtime basis. We have delegated powers. It is restructuring much more than you can imagine,” Prabhu said.

Seeking to quell the perception that the speed of reforms was slow, the minister said 36 out of 39 announcements made in the railway budget had been implemented.

Asked if funding for the railways, said to be one of the lynchpins in PM Modi’s plans to revive the economy, was a problem, Prabhu said it wasn’t and that there was more money available globally than what the organization could handle.

In addition to the Rs 1.5 lakh crore from LIC, Prabhu said the railways was exploring funding from multilateral agencies such as World Bank and Asian Development Bank, and through tax-free bonds.