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.
True enough, if one just scans the monthly flash report on progress of projects put out by the ministry of programme implementation, the backlog looks menacing. Of the shelf of pending investment projects of Rs 4,86,766 crore, there has been an 11.17% cost overrun, or Rs 48,923 crore. That number is more than the two stimulus packages announced by the government in December 2008 and January 2009.
In the railway ministry itself the cost of overrun is Rs 5,838 crore. The reason for the delay in those projects, year after year is then obvious. The same officialdom is not keen to get those completed. Just as complete projects like the Delhi Metro brings in returns, incomplete projects too generate returns to those involved.
I suppose one need to sort out those which need to be completed versus those which can happily continue to remain half finished. This is important for those involved to deliver on policies and more important on projects. But for that, the signals should come through clearly.
As you travel between Gwalior and Morena, there is a fabulous piece of road. This is national highway number 3. The road is part of the series of several other such pieces that surprise tired motorists after long stretches of sheer anguish that pass for roads even on most arterial connections.
This piece of road was completed in 2006. But the sudden crippling affliction that hit the building of interstate highways in this government?s term meant the National Highways Authority of India, that had set a monthly target for completion of projects was left without any direction.
In 2008 a search committee graded three candidates by suitability for the top post. The first one on the list was not released by his minister and the second by his state government. The signals were clear?the authority was simply not the place to be in.
There is in fact a nice tail piece to this tale. In 2003, India decided to cut down the number of countries from which it would take aid. A huge list of countries was pruned to only seven. The finance ministry was immediately besieged with the ambassadors of the countries asked to direct any money they had to civil society directly, without routing it through the government.
The countries were concerned, a very senior official in the ministry told me, that routing the funds to other countries would mean additional headache for them. The Indian government machinery produced excellent utilisation records of the funds that were given here that passed muster the audit sieves of all the donor countries. This was a big inducement to place the funds here.
?subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com