Indications are that Lalu Prasad Yadav is looking at his stint in the railway ministry as a chance to strengthen his image in national politics. Aditi Phadnis finds out why Lalu is this government's most powerful minister, while K P Narayana Kumar comes to terms with his understanding of the ministry. Everywhere he looked, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saw only problems. Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa were in the grip of floods.
He had visited Maharashtra and the poignant stories of farmer suicides had anguished him deeply. Once a key member of his government, K Natwar Singh was pouring vitriol, not just on him but on his entire government.
The rise in prices was alarming and he was being criticised from all sections of Parliament. Not only had his own party spoken about this at party fora demanding the government do something about it, the allies of the government, including the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal, had joined a walkout by Lok Sabha members.
When he got a request that railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav wanted to see him, the PM expected more brickbats. The leader of the RJD had come to see him with a contingent of 30-odd MPs.
"I want to apologise," Lalu Prasad said in his inimitable style. "We are deeply sorry that our party embarrassed you by joining the walkout. I have told them it was not right." As his MPs hung their heads, "the PM virtually had tears in his eyes", said an aide.
Why is the railway minister so important for this government? The obvious answer is, of course, that with 23 MPs in the Lok Sabha and eight in the Rajya Sabha, it is impossible to ignore the RJD's presence in the UPA.
The second reason: think about it "" can you spot the UPA in any of the Hindi heartland states "" UP, MP, Rajasthan, Bihar? The RJD is the only UPA presence in a vast swathe that is a third of India.
But it is the third reason that is the most important. In the last two years, the Prime Minister has acquired a pretty shrewd idea of how much each of his allies is worth.
When you look at it, his council of ministers is like a cricket team that might have many brilliant individual players but can win only if it performs well as a team. For this the captain has to know what each of his team members is realistically capable of.
The PM started with some notions that have not proved entirely correct. For instance, he invested a lot of faith and belief in agriculture minister Sharad Pawar. Unfortunately, Pawar failed to deliver. The delay over wheat import was inexplicable and now there are reports that round-tripping of wheat (there are no bars on the export of wheat) has begun.
Involved as he is in the affairs of the Board of Cricket Control in India, Sharad Pawar gets little time to run the agriculture ministry. It is not surprising that despite reports of farmers' suicide pouring in, it was the PM who announced an expert group on rural indebtedness, not the agriculture minister.
By contrast, the village hick, Lalu Prasad has performed beyond expectation. True, Lalu Prasad inherited a healthy railway ministry from his predecessor Nitish Kumar. But he has innovated and built upon this legacy.
In 2005-06, growth in freight loading and revenues were up by 10 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. Freight loading increased from 635 million tonnes to 668 million tonnes and freight revenue has increased from Rs 33,480 crore to Rs 36,490 crore.
The railways says its Tenth Plan targets of 624 million tonnes and 396 billion tonne kilometers have been surpassed a year in advance. Passenger earnings, coaching earnings and sundry other earnings increased by 7 per cent, 19 per cent and 56 per cent respectively over the previous year.
The operating ratio (share of operating expenditure in revenue) was the lowest in a decade at 83.7 per cent. The ministry has set a target of Rs 20,000 crore as internal generation this fiscal.
In the freight area as well, the railways has shown how it can think out of the box to beat competition. Last year, it increased the maximum permissible loading level in wagons that led to an increase in its freight carrying capacity by about 11 per cent. Playing the volumes game, it is now marketing its freight services, instead of waiting for customers to approach it. The results are for all to see.
In the first quarter of the current financial year, the railways moved 30 per cent more freight in two of its key markets "" cement and iron and steel. With the growth in these industries' production not more than 10 per cent in this period, the railways' market share in domestic cement transportation rose to 48 per cent in April-June 2006, up from 40 per cent in the same period of 2005.
In iron and steel, the increase in the railways' market share was even more impressive "" going up from 33 per cent to 40 per cent in the same period.
Also, its share in the transportation of oil and petroleum products is on the rise, with more business coming not just from the state-owned refineries, but also from the private sector oil refineries. And all this has been achieved while earning more profit. Today, the railways earns a surplus of over a billion dollars every quarter.
But the significance of the railways turnaround story is not in the statistics but in the transformation of a die-hard populist politician into a minister as anxious about earning revenue as funding projects that promise political dividends.
Lalu Prasad's projects are now supported by sound economic logic, even the Garib Rath (or poor man's chariot) that will make air-conditioned train travel affordable to the poor.
The Garib Rath is a dream he's bent on realising. With a team from the Rail Design Standards Organisation working overtime on the coach design, the Rath is likely to roll out this October.
But the poor man's luxury train is only one instance of the radical ideas being implemented in the dusty corridors of Rail Bhawan. Buoyed by its success and the Rs 13,000 crore the railways were able to generate through internal accruals, Lalu is promising a whole new railway culture complete with cleaner trains and platforms, food plazas, ticket-vending ATMs and better security systems.
On the freight side too, the railways has allowed private players in container transportation and is working on the big-ticket dedicated freight corridor that is expected to decongest the existing network.
Like any good businessman, when he decided to overhaul the system, the railway minister decided to call in the expert. Officer on special duty Sudhir Kumar is in charge of the ideas crucible. The soft-spoken Bihar cadre IAS officer from Haryana has a passion for the job rarely associated with the public sector.
A graduate from the Delhi School of Economics, Kumar's mantra is to provide quality transporation. The idea, he says, is to get out of peripheral activities such as catering and lodging and concentrate instead on carrying passengers and freight.
"The railways has so many assets, such as land and advertising space. We want to utilise these resources to raise revenue, and invest it on tracks and trains," he says.
So surplus land has been leased out for construction of budget hotels, and advertising is being developed into a moneyspinner. The railways is even considering letting out space on the bodies of its long-distance trains.
The winds of change could not have arrived at a better time. Until around 2003, the railways had captive passengers across its air-conditioned, sleeper and general compartments.
True, the trains were dirty, not entirely dependable in terms of punctuality, and there was no service to speak of. But even upper-middle class families preferred an air-conditioned coach to a flight because of the cost factor.
Till Deccan Air revolutionised the aviation industry with low-cost fares. Overnight, the railways began to lose passengers to a host of low-cost carriers.
Lalu Prasad Yadav decided he wouldn't take this lying down. "We realised that passengers from long-distance trains would be snatched away by the airlines at any cost, since the cost benefit on those routes was particularly high for them. However, for overnight journeys, even passengers who could afford a low-cost airline ticket at around Rs 5,000 would prefer to take a train at half that price," says a senior railway official.
Thus, the railways decided to increase the number of trains that would ply on short distances, and gradually reduce the number of bogies on long-distance trains.
Air-conditioning is the one single comfort factor the railways has identified to make journeys a more pleasant experience for commuters. "If the Garib Rath succeeds, we will try to fully air-condition all our trains," says Sudhir Kumar.
The cost of air-conditioning per seat is only Rs 140, he says, which does not justify the huge chasm that exists between sleeper class and air-conditioned class tickets. That was the reason Lalu Prasad chose to rationalise the fares in his second railway budget, announcing a cut in price for two- and three-tier air-condioned tickets.
Not satisfied with taking on the challenge of the low-cost carriers, the railways is now hoping to steal away passengers from the full service airlines. On-board entertainment might be the answer; passengers on Shatabdi trains will soon be offered a six-channel music system, not unlike the one on Kingfisher Airlines.
Another significant improvement could be the conversion of existing railway stations in the larger cities into mega-terminals, and the building of new ones in medium-sized cities. These mega-terminals are expected to be built to European standards with separate arrival and departure concourses.
"The mega-terminals will be quieter because departing and arriving passengers will not have to squeeze past each other," says an official. Fourteen such terminals have been identified in the first phase of improvement.
Instead of putting its own money into these projects, the railways has decided on public private partnerships to fund improvements. For improving the facilities at waiting rooms, for instance, the railways plans to allow private operators to run these facilities in exchange for earnings that accrue from advertising leases.
More concretely, the railways is setting up a locomotive factory and a coach factory, each at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore. While the locomotive factory is to come up in Chapra, in Bihar, the coach factory will be set up at Rae Bareili, in Uttar Pradesh.
Railway officials say the existing coach factories in Kapurthala and Chennai produce only 2,000 coaches against a perceived demand for 5,000 coaches in the next five years.
Similarly, the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works and the Varanasi Diesel Locomotive Works produce only 250 units a year. There is a plan to expand the capacity of these units to 400 a year, to provide the railways with 2,000 locos in the next five years, but the demand is for 4,000 locos.
The establishment of a factory in Sonia Gandhi's constituency is an instance of the ministry conforming to the railway minister's political strategies. The factory is expected to generate employment for around 5,000-10,000 people and would be a political windfall for the Congress President.
If that has disappointed the slew of foreign coach manufacturing companies that have been paying court at Rail Bhawan, it was a similar line the minister took when it came to the argument on the dedicated freight corridor project.
The minister refused to allow the private sector to dominate the special purpose vehicle that was to be set up for the project and insisted on the railways controlling the project.
On ground too, the changes in the way the ministry is run are apparent. General managers across the country receive calls day in and day out to check whether train speeds have been increased, for instance. The feedback is tabulated periodically and the figures "" of additional revenue, speed and freight loading "" are analysed. Sudhir Kumar's table is littered with statistical compilations.
There have been allegations that the railway board has been superceded while taking some decisions "" a charge the OSD stoutly defends "" but the functioning of the ministry is a pointer to the way Lalu Prasad has begun to view politics.
It began with the assembly election defeat. The Bihar election of 2005 sobered Lalu Prasad "" whose party was in power in Bihar for 15 years "" considerably. Anyone would have been sobered by it. But despite suffering its worst loss in 15 years, the RJD continues to be the party with the largest individual share of votes (23.24 per cent as compared to the Janata Dal U's 20.32).
Lalu Prasad's worries stemmed from the RJD's defeat in its traditional Yadav strongholds like the Kosi and Saran regions, which include the Madhepura and Chapra Lok Sabha seats. The RJD had won both seats in 2004, but did not win even a single assembly seat in these parliamentary segments this time.
At first it was galling to have to congratulate Nitish Kumar, so Lalu Prasad took the easy way out "" he just didn't congratulate him, avoiding even a chance meeting at the airport. Later this was turned into a strategy.
"If we criticise Nitish Kumar now, we will look graceless. Just wait. Bihar's problems are so complex, Nitish Kumar will come up against the same problems that Laluji faced. Then we will see how he tackles them."
Sure enough, the attack has already started. Earlier this week, Lalu Prasad called Nitish Kumar "liar No. 1", when told that a TV channel's survey rated Nitish as No. 1 CM in India.
Charging Nitish for taking credit for schemes that had been centrally-sponsored, he said: "Nitish has announced a Rs10 subsidy per litre for diesel for farmers. Where will he get the money from?"
He advised Nitish to concentrate on tackling the drought-like situation facing the state. "I will request the Bihar governor to hold an all-party meet to discuss the issue," he said.
The big challenge for Lalu Prasad now is to win the two Lok Sabha by-elections "" Nalanda, the seat vacated by Nitish when he resigned from the Lok Sabha; and Bhagalpur. Elections to these two seats can be announced any day.
Meanwhile, the minister's recently developed penchant for English sound bytes has made some of his old acquaintances curious. "He never gave importance to the English media earlier," says a political observer who has known the minister for many years.
The buzz is that the minister has turned bilingual keeping an audience beyond Bihar in mind. In an article slipped under the glass of the table in media advisor Tehseen Munawar's room, a well known film director argues why Lalu Prasad should become prime minister.
The one obstacle in the way of that ambition is his image. The minister often complains of how it's been tarnished by the media and political opponents with jargon like "jungle raj". He views his stint at the railways as a chance to rebrand the Lalu persona. For now, the strategy seems to be working.
POLITICAL PLAY
Leads a 31-MP strong contingent in the UPA government Has traded in state politics for a national role Since no one questions his power, the railway ministry is allowed to function without interference from outside Renunciation of populist politics in favour of result-based corporate governance THE CHANGING FACE OF THE RAILWAYS UNDER LALU Air-conditioned coaches for the poor, modern mega-terminals, entertainment on board the Shatabdi... A dedicated freight corridor in the future and competitive freight offerings for now A new locomotive factory in Bihar, and a coach factory in Sonia Gandhi's constituency |
