Whenever anyone talks about the Indian Railways or it’s over
the head financial turnaround, one name that invariably comes to our mind is the rustic, maverick, wily and shrewd Lalu Prasad Yadav.

What makes Lalu so special? What are the strategies that he formulated for this turnaround? What is his modus operandi? I will try to find answers to these questions in this post.

When lalu took over the reins of the railways in the year 2004, it was a “huge” loss making organisation.The Rakesh Mohan Committee (headed by Rakesh Mohan, secretary, department of economic affairs) even went on to predict that it would hit the Rs 61,000 crore (US$15.4 billion) mark in bankruptcy by the year 2015. The only solution
seemed to be privatization. Then lalu came into the scene and defied conventional logic by engineering the financial turnaround by without even touching the passenger fares and found other sources of revenue.

The present railway budget that he has presented not only does not raise the passenger fares and freight charges but also reduces the passenger fares and also the freight charges on inflation sensitive products like petrol, diesel(both of them by 5 p.c. apiece) and flyash by 10p.c. The present step is going to go a long way in containing the raise in inflation.

Sceptics say that all that Lalu did is to implement the recommendations that were proposed by the top bureaucrats in the railways(without much interference) for which he is the face. Whatever be the truth, we have seen an unprecedented growth in the railways under the helm of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The impact made by Lalu on the Indian Railways made the press say “just like there is no samosa without
aloo, there is no railways without laloo.”

To sum it up lalu had been called by colleges like Harvard and Wharton to explain the financial turnaround of the railways andstill there are eight more ivy league colleges waiting. Our own iim ahmedabad has prepared a case on it.