Indian Railways transport over 18 million passengers daily. The Railways are the largest employer in India with 1.4 million workers.
The network expands over 7,000 stations across 28 states and one Union Territory.
The public utility company has reported a cash surplus of Rs 25,000 crore in 2007-08.
A new freight corridor is in the works between Ludhiana and Sone Nagar, and Mumbai and Tughlakabad.
Five corridors are under consideration for the introduction of superfast trains and modernisation plans have been put in place for New Delhi, Jaipur, Amritsar, Agra, Patna and Anand Vihar stations. Another 16 have also been planned for the next phase.
NUGGETS
Selections from management journals
Also Read
Astrigo is in trouble. The home improvement chain has missed its earnings forecast badly and sales are falling. A 10 per cent reduction in staff looks like the only choice. Layoffs, however, would undermine the retailer’s longtime commitment to employees and the ability to provide its famed customer service. But tapping cash reserved for strategic acquisitions goes against the firm’s values, too. What should the CEO do?
Board advisers Laurence J Stybel and Maryanne Peabody, of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, suggest that the company borrow a page from McDonald’s and declare Astrigo’s intention to focus on the interests of long-term shareholders. This move would establish a framework that would help management make tactical decisions with more clarity and flexibility. The company could then use its cash to buy a little time to study the options.
Management professor Robert I Sutton thinks too many executives assume that layoffs are the best way to reduce costs. They don’t factor in how long it takes to realise the savings from job cuts, the costs to hire and train people once business picks up, or the damage to morale and productivity. Astrigo’s executives should consider alternatives such as pay cuts, reduced benefits, unpaid time off and incentives for departure. If layoffs are inevitable, Astrigo should do them quickly, and firing the bottom 10 per cent of employees would be the worst approach.
The layoff
By Bronwyn Fryer
Harvard Business Review, March 2009
Read this article at http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/
Consumer spending, home prices and employment levels are but a few of the economic vital signs that have plummeted during the upheaval of the past months. While these indicators help to describe today’s crisis, new research by Paola Sapienza (Kellogg) and Luigi Zingales (Booth) suggests that true insight into the root causes of a nation’s financial strength or weakness lies in a different measure: Trust. The authors point out that when Lehman Brothers defaulted and AIG had to be rescued by the US government in September, the country’s economy was still cruising along — second quarter growth was a comfortable 2.8 per cent. How did the default of an investment bank, with limited lending to the real economy, snowball into the financial crisis we face today? The researchers say it all comes down to trust.
The first wave of their newly launched Financial Trust Index shows how trust in US financial institutions and government leadership has eroded and offers possible causes and effects that must be confronted in order to design and implement successful plans to rebuild.
Measuring trust: Introducing the Financial Trust Index
Kellogg Insight, February 2009
Read this artcile at http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/ ; read more on the research at www.financialtrustindex.org
Even as discretionary budgets are drying up, some B2B vendors have found a way to reach their customers’ resource owners and motivate them to buy. They do this by identifying a thorny issue in the customer’s company or industry and developing an original, compelling point of view about it. They pitch this point of view to a carefully chosen line executive in one crucial meeting and then prove its worth with a short diagnostic study. This is the essence of what the authors, all managing directors at TCG Advisors, call provocation-based selling.
Provocation-based selling doesn’t identify and respond to the customer’s “pain points”; it outlines a problem the customer hasn’t yet put a name to. Framing a provocation creates a readiness to listen, and a diagnostic study converts the dialogue into a contract. The provocation-based sales cycle is resource intensive but appreciably shorter than that for solution-based selling — and it leads to significant business opportunities.
In a downturn, provoke your customers
By Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore
Harvard Business Review, March 2009
Read this article at http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/