Indian Railways

This week, I read an article in Outlook Business about IndianRailways.
I remembered a mail which i sent to my friend in 2004. Here is the email.

From:
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 9:17 PM
To:
Subject: Getting India’s railways on track by Christoph Wolff

Check this attached Mckinsey article.

When i was returning back to hyd in train,was thinking that Indian Railways is one typical example of a govt Organization

1.with Huge employees and hence with less productivity.
2.with lot of untapped growth areas like goods carrying.

And this thought got strengthened,when i saw the Railway goods area last week,when i went to get the vehicle sent from CBE.

Strangely,it is still not computerised and the godown is just so horrible with improper maintainence and they track the goods by the sketch writings on the sack.

There were so many old uncollected goods and the place was a real mess.

This author has captured all the thoughts and expressed it in such a structured manner...it's really great.
(maybe thatswhat they'll learn in MBA!!)

But at the same time,he hasn't covered or expressed the varying fields in which Railways can earn revenue.(maybe this will be explained,when the government appoints them for consulting :))

Below one is an example of a missed out thing.

There were plans of laying down fiber optics cables across the railway network...such a great idea...but don't know to what extent it's really happening now...check this site for further details on this...

http://www.tenet.res.in/rural/rail.html

Hope our government does something to Railways soon,instead of trying to split into several more regions.It's a great organization with untapped potential.

rgds,

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And strangely the article which i read about Railways was how IT is changing the way Railways is working....Below mentioned are 3 such cases...
It talks about something called CRIS(Center for Railway Information Systems). Strangely as per this website, http://www.indianrail.gov.in/abcris.html this was established in 1986 and the effects are slowly seen only now...
The another one mentioned is FOIS (Freight Operations Information System). Railways has made good profits this year thanks to the improvements due to these systems in place..
A good case study about this is present in CMC website..
http://www.cmcltd.com/case_studies/transportation/fois.htm

And one other obvious example of IT in Railways is IRCTC website. Nowadays, i think anybody who has access to Internet, books tickets only thru the website. And this is supposed to the No.1 online website in India. Imagine how much revenue can be achieved by advertisements, reducing resources...

Infact after reading the article, i really felt happy that not everything is bad in our system.

Thinking is in the right direction...but the problem lies in planning and execution.

Why does a CRIS setup in 1986 took so much time to really execute things?
This delay would've costed thousands of crores as loss to Railways and also the productivity of the industries which are dependent on Railways.

And i think this is the one of the problems in Infrastructure development side...

First of all, there are not many highways being constructed....still the major blunder is, the few parts where highways are being constructed, it is only 4 lane...this is not right, it should be atleast 6 lanes..

the cost involved in making a 4 lane highway to 6 lane might be equivalent to coming up with a new one...and 4 lane is really not enough in a country like india where we have all type of vehicles being driven on the highways...

when something of this scale is being done, it should be done right at the first time..