The barber and Indian Railways

Recently, speaking about unfinished railway projects, Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu used the analogy of the lone roadside barber in a village. He said the barber followed a simple strategy to ensure he didn't lose a single customer. When a bunch of customers trooped into his shop, he attended to all of them together, snipping one's hair a little, moving to the next one to shave a bit of his beard and so on. The Railways followed a similar strategy in the past. To make everyone happy, it would allocate Rs 5 crore here and Rs 10 crore there, ending up with a whole lot of incomplete projects in the process. Prabhu was at the Business Standard office in New Delhi to interact with journalists.