Column : Get rid of the backlog

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: Every day at Rail Bhawan in New Delhi, officials from the traffic division of the ministry of railways switch on phone connections across 16 cities to get down to possibly the world’s largest piece of daily logistical exercise. Almost like a bunch of pre-school kids, they pick up 7,000 freight trains and shuffle them around real time to ensure that each travels loaded from one zone to another.

Since each empty rake that travels a 500 kilometre stretch, costs the railways Rs 12 lakh per trip, the opportunity costs are easy to calculate. How deftly they cut down that flab determines how close to hundred percent the railways use their freight cartage capacity and more important, ensure steel, coal and cement companies get to move their consignments to buyers just in time. Every month the level of complexity of the exercise is increasing as railway ministers add dozens of passenger trains to clog the arterial routes. But despite that they manage to reach a rake—railway speak for a freight train to any destination in India within six days.

Just across the road, at Shastri Bhawan, another set of officials do an equally intricate exercise. They make sure fertiliser from factories reach the farm gate each month, to make certain the huge food security network of rice and wheat cultivation does not break down. The exercise has to take account of rainfall patterns that change every week, the season of the year, and impending shortages that could at a flash develop into a law and order problem. Every half an hour, the officers get phone calls from hyper-ventilating state ministers who think they are being short changed wagons of fertilisers.

The reasons I feel like recording their efforts is to clear a conception that Indian officials cannot deliver consistent quality regularly. They do. The fact that they do regularly even in fractious ministries like railways and fertilisers only adds to the tales.

I was reminded of this recently when talking to Deepak Parekh, chairman of HDFC. He rightly pointed out that there were enough policies and projects going around for the any new government to choose from. What was needed, he said, was a sense of urgency in implementing those.