CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LALU's TENURE
(1) Marks obtained by a student cannot be judged without having idea of the toughness of questions asked and leniency of checking the answer sheet. Similarly performance of RM cannot be evaluated without having idea of handover received and economic/political environment during the tenure.
(2) Laloo was the luckiest RM to see all the greens, i.e.
* good...
more... handover by Nitish who strengthened the rail network through rail safety fund and gave a push to capacity augmentation through formation of RVNL.
* Booming national and global economy where IR was flushed with huge incremental revenue earning bulk freight offering by the industry.
* Freehand without strings because of one of the weakest PM ever governing our nation through a coalition government.
(3) Combo of above helped Lalu to carry additional 8 tons per wagons to carry additional load. Credit goes to Lalu permit higher (over?) of wagons to earn more by increasing the loading per wagon. As a result IR was flushed with surplus funds like never before.
(4) There was urgent need for IR to go for the capacity augmentation & strengthening of tracks in a big way to carry increased load with safety. This golden opportunity was wasted by Lalu, who used the extra revenue due to economic boom on subsidizing the pax. fares especially non ac fares.
(5) Funds allotted for many capacity augmentation projects were not utilized/released inspite of IR flushed with surplus funds is somewhat surprising. Capacity augmentation got delayed leading to supersaturation of trunk lines and loss of punctuality in coming years. He used funds to serve his political interests i.e. тАЬsocially desirableтАЭ new lines in his home state.
(6) Huge profits were shown by further doing jugglery with financial accounts, which was discovered later.
(7) His train GR was good but here too there was a trick. The side middle berth was a bad decision. Initially, there was proposal to increase height of coach so that SMB is not that inconvenient, but SMB was introduced in existing trains which were withdrawn after there were large scale complaints. Using normal ACIII ICF coach at normal ACIII fares in GR would have been better. Reduction of ACIII cost by 2-3% (as in GR) cannot make a berth so cheap that тАЬgaribтАЭ i.e. poor can easily afford it! It was all a political announcement to gain votes of "garibs", who actually shall never travel in these trains!!
(8) Most of the trains introduced by him were long distance one which normally gets well patronized.
(9) One good thing with Lalu was he gave free hand to Sudheer Kumar who did his job well by pushing for forward looking projects like DFCs. But it was moving very slow and nothing concrete could happen during his regime. Actual contracts and construction activity picked up in last 2 years only.
(10) In a nutshell a very lucky RM who unfortunately lost the golden opportunity to transform IR. Very big mouthed talking, highly exagarated on projection, actually mediocre in performance, & extremely popular with media are attributes of this period.
