Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief : every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)
The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance. Delays are inevitable. But even when disaster strikes—as when terrorists bombed tracks in Mumbai in 2006—the railway heals itself quickly, usually within days, like a starfish growing back its arm. To grasp the difficulty of the operation, just imagine running a much bigger version of Wal-Mart, and then add a few wild cards, such as an employee literacy rate of 60 percent and terrorists trying to blow up your stores.
Indian Railways is a government enterprise, and it has the dead weight characteristic of state organs. Employees live in housing provided by the Railways, send their kids to Railways schools, and visit Railways doctors when sick. Nearly a million are pensioners, and therefore provide no value to the ministry at all. Those who do work encounter predictable bureaucratic headaches : the ministry’s departments (six in total, for electrical, staff, engineering, mechanical, traffic, and financial concerns) operate in a stovepipe fashion, with minimal cross-pollination and little effort to coordinate and ensure that the railways as a whole run well. And ultimately Indian Railways has to answer to the taxpayers and citizens who support it, and who quite understandably want assurances that their train set will keep its fares low enough for them to afford.
In 2001, a report by the BJP predicted that the Indian Railways would hemorrhage cash at a rate of $12 billion annually by 2015. (The whole budget of the Indian government, by comparison, is $128 billion.) Indian Railways was barely managing to cover its daily operating costs, to say nothing of paying for the new equipment and strengthening bridges. The report concluded : “It is very likely that Indian Railways would be a heavily-loss-making entity—in fact one well on the path toward bankruptcy, if it were not state owned.” Outsiders whispered the word “privatization” but were hushed : Indian Railways has been a source of national pride since before independence, and statist sentimentalists could never let it fail.
The cerebral cortex of the whole system is the Rail Bhavan, a pinkish monolith near Parliament in New Delhi. The Rail Bhavan is, in a way, surrounded by its own competition : its street is permanently filled with the traffic of taxis, trucks, buses, and rickshaws that for a time seemed poised to steal away the rails’ business altogether. Outside, a decommissioned green locomotive and the railways’ mascot, Bholu the Elephant, announce to the mess of traffic that the railways are not to be counted out.
Inside, the conditions do not inspire confidence. The building is big, disordered, and honeycombed with offices that bear stultifying bureaucratic titles (“Manager, Zonal Railways, Deputy”). The hallways all have torn-up ceilings. Some are so dark that I have to use a pocket flashlight to read names on the doors, and inside the offices the level of technology is shockingly low. Employees’ business cards have Yahoo ! addresses. P.K. Sharma, the bright and competent director of personnel, has on his desk a foot-high pile of green folders bound together with shoelaces. From that desk, 2.5 million lives are managed, and there is not a computer in sight.
