When Indians were falling short of management leaders the media and the IIM's( cant understand y an IIM) had to create a new management guru in the form of our very own mr.chaara ghotala...wow.....i labh u india.....

New Delhi: Railway minister Lalu Prasad may soon make it to IIM-Ahmedabad. The B-school is considering making the Indian Railways’ turnaround story a case study for its students. Impressed by the healthy balance sheet of the railways, G Raghuraman, professor, public systems group, at IIM-A, will lead a team that will hold discussions with Lalu and his officials later this week. Whether the turnaround can be sustained even after the RJD chief moves out of Rail Bhavan will also be built into the case study. “There have been good results in the last two years. One would like to highlight the underlying processes (of the turnaround) as only two years ago the railways had been written off. We want to understand how much of it is due to the initiatives of the railway minister and his team, and if it can be sustained after him,’’ Raghuraman told TOI. IIM-A is the latest addition to the growing list of admirers of the railways success story. In 2001, an expert committee under Rakesh Mohan, who is now deputy governor of the RBI, had written off the railways, saying the Centre’s largest departmental enterprise was on the verge of a financial collapse, and also faced bankruptcy. While the committee, of which Raghuraman was a member, had said that the Centre would be saddled with an additional financial burden of over Rs 61,000 crore, Indian Railways, defying the dark prognosis, is estimated to have already generated nearly Rs 13,000 crore internally and reportedly had fund balances of Rs 11,280 crore by the end of March 2006. The success story stands out also because it has happened under Lalu, a person who never had reformist pretensions. However, the IIM-A case study will focus on the economic aspects, including the parallels between the change in the fortunes of the Indian Railways and the turnaround scripted by the US’ Federal Railroad Administration in the 1980s. While Indian Railways focused on increasing capacity utilisation through a host of simple but sensible measures, the Staggers Act, Rail Act of 1980, which deregulated the industry in the US, left it to railroads to decide where they would run the trains and the tariffs they would charge. Courtesy:: Times of India.. Mumbai, dtd 3rd May'06