It is a big achievement for Mr Prabhu as RM In fact some of the achievements which make him most deserving RM to
(1) PPP projects i.e. participation of beneficiary states/ PSUs/ Private companies had been Achilles heel of IR. Since last decade or two every RM had been touting about intention to bring big funding to IR and all have miserably failed. This tough nut has been cracked by none other than Mr. Prabhu.
(2) Online and onboard help provided to the travelling paxs in event of sick passengers, hungry babies,...
more... dirty coaches, bad pantry/food service, molesting of female paxs etc is something unimaginable and even private sector companies could not give such king of service.
(3) Capacity augmentation- He will be known as first RM of India who took concrete steps to solve the biggest problem of IR i.e. saturated BG tracks which is primary cause of accidents/ slower speeds/ longer journey times/ poor punctuality and financial losses. This was done inspite of the extremely poor financial condition of IR (thanks to past RMs), he could speed up the capacity augmentation and almost doubled the kms of new BG lines (New/Doubling/GC) commissioned per day, pace of electrificatio too have been almost doubled.
(4) The trend followed by past RMs since decades was to introduce more and more new train on highly saturated tracks without adequately augmenting the track capacity, which was resulting in further saturating/worsening the tracks. He restricted this populous trend by restricting the number of new trains and doubling the rate of capacity augmentation which he intend to more than quadruple in next 4 years.
(5) He has made a good setting with power ministry by buying much cheaper power directly from power producer rather than SEBs leadin to annual savings of about 5000 crore Rs.
(6) He has laid emphasis on cleanliness and pollution free power by emphasising on Solar power plants on coaches in addition to stations. IR is also embarking on wind power generation in addition to continued emphasis on powersaving LED lighting in Rly premises
(7) Accounting reforms under implementaion in IR is pet project of RM which shall make IR a much better managed organisation with potential to drastically increase its revenues and curtail its expenses/ losses.
(8) Biggest organisational change he made is delegating power to the competent/experienced persons doing the job i.e. GMs/DRMs instead of wielding the power held by past RMs. He has empowered the IR officials and onus lies on these officials to stop complaining about waiting for clearance from top and give the results by the end of every financial year.
(9) Efficiency of working in IR has been drastically improved with clearances coming in less than half the time it used to take earlier and as a result construction of a large number of projects have started and large RKMs of existing projects were commissioned. Of course he successfully has tied up funds for that.
(10) Biggest thing is he has desisted from earlier trends of announcing a financially bleeding large number of politically motivated new projects. Many non performing DDs were stoped and redeployed on other routes, record augmentation of coaches were done by him (instead of starting new trains). Probably for first time RM is somewhat acting like CEO and not minister.
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Inspite of all above, he is also hated by wide section of society due to highly one unjustified step i.e. flexifare launched by IR during his regime. It has been reported that IR is planning to do away with flexifares and go for minor above board fare increase in all classes.
This was basically a compulsion to tide cash crunch which he inherited from past RMs ( and implementation of 7th pay commission and very high pax subsidy) and to tide over very low loading offered by industry to IR during his regime which is not under the control of IR.
Still a lot more efforts has to be done to bring IR out of the financial crisis.
