My parents can't afford to disturb their monthly budget by buying me a flight ticket so I have to travel between my hometown Unnao and Bengaluru by train. I have traveled (by train) on this route on more than 10 occasions now and having read the often appearing reports in the newspapers and magazines about the great turnaround of Indian Railways for quite some time now I was prompted to vent my thoughts on this which I admit have largely been shaped by my experience in traveling by train and also few articles which have sought to present the true picture of this turnaround. One among such articles was one authored by Mr. Subir Roy, an economist whose articles are published regularly in the Business Standard. In this article the author had averred that on the basis of ROCE (Return on Capital Employed- a measure of the returns that a company is realising from the capital employed by it. It is commonly used as a measure for comparing the performance between businesses and for assessing whether a business generates enough returns to pay for its cost of capital) the performance of the Indian Railways during the tenure of Shri Ramvilas Paswan and Shri Nitish Kumar(if I remember correctly) was much better than its performance under Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav. Besides, the other day Nitish Kumar stated that at present the tracks are being over- utilised to the extent of 160 %- assuming this to be true this data presents a rather scary picture of the days to come. Relying upon my experience I can say one thing without hesitation- on grounds of punctuality, quality of food, cleanliness, availability of water and other such things (which in my opinion matter much more to a traveler than the balance-sheet of Indian Railways) the situation hasn't changed much and on certain grounds deteriorated. The simple issue is- for a service oriented orgainsation like Indian Railways what should be the parameter against which its success should be gauged? If it is things which I attach a greater importance to then it's ridiculous to say that a turnaround has taken place. Far from it, even on grounds of ROCE, other ministers (assuming they can be credited for the good financial performance of railways) fared better than Lalu. It's a pity to see newspapers and magazines of repute portraying an incomplete picture in favour of Lalu. At the cost of maintenance Mr. Lalu is busy burdening the already over-burdened infrastructure of Railways with his populist announcements mostly in the form of new trains from/to his homestate.
