Lalu Prasad Yadav - a name to bookmark in case we regain control

[donsu]

of america any time soon

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HC23Df01.html


Maverick engineers Indian Railways turnaround

Asia's largest railway network, India's national lifeline and one of its perennial financial headaches, has found an unlikely savior in Lalu Prasad Yadav, a maverick politician often dismissed as a rustic buffoon or a crook.

Yadav, fighting corruption cases ranging from a US$225 million fodder scam to a $789 million subsidized-food-grain scam, has as railway minister turned the world's second-largest rail network around. Indian Railways now has $2.48 billion in fund balances, from $78 million in 2001, a stunning reversal after being long seen as a terminal debt trap.

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Dubai Ports, fresh from its US ports controversy, was among 14 companies bidding for the railway container business, which is expected to attract more than $2.255 billion in the next decade. The railways have already collected $121.8 million as registration fees.

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The turnaround came after Lalu Yadav flipped the management rule book on its head. With petroleum prices increasing, Yadav did not increase fares but slashed them, reducing air-conditioned upper-class categories from 18% to 10 %, a move also forced by budget airlines eating into the railways' higher-end customer base.
Declaring that resource constraints won't stop expansion of the rail network, Yadav said in his budget speech in February that he would encourage public partnerships and public-private partnership schemes. They include opening food plazas and bank machines at the important stations across the 63,000-plus-kilometer rail route, and a new timetable (replacing one based on a timetable prepared in 1866 by a British company, Bradshaw) to reduce running time of express trains by up to four hours.
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when the whole world stops driving cars each Wednesday we will need good trains