Express of change: red, yellow or green for Indian Railways

Pages: 231-233
Sona Raghuvanshi (Amity Global Business School Mumbai, Mumbai, Maharashtra)

Last year, Indian Railways, the fourth largest railways network of the world, took the plunge to carry out major restructuring in line with recommendations of several committees namely the Prakash Tandon Committee (1994); Rakesh Mohan Committee (2001); Sam Pitroda Committee (2012); and Bibek Debroy Committee (2015). More than 160 years old, Indian Railways has failed to match the growth rate of the country. Operating ratio has gone up from 74.7% in early sixtiesto 98.4% in last few years.Losing marketshare to road and airlinesin both passenger as well as goods traffic has put a lot of pressure on its profitability. As per recommendation of different committees, excessive departmentalization is identified as the biggest hurdle in the growth of Indian Railways. Traffic, civil, mechanical, electrical,signal and telecom,stores, personnel, and accounts are the important departmentsin IndianRailways, which are vertically separated.Each department isrepresented by a secretary level officerinRailwayBoard.This hasmade IR an extremely complex over departmentalized organization characterized by unhealthy and ugly competition among the departmentsforlimited resources andmanagement posts,resulting in poorteamwork and ineffective decisionmaking. Recommendation for organizational restructuring has always met with lot of resistance from officers as well as union and several administrative problems. Lastyear, in order to end depart mentalism and improve effective and smooth decisionmaking,restructuring ofthe IndianRailwaysleading to merger of eight of GroupAservices was given a green signal by the Cabinet. Now the concern is if merging the services would actually help in the growth of the Indian railways as there would be a lot of resistance from the officers as well as the union. If yes, then should the recommendation be modified or should the original plan be implemented?