Elattuvalapil Sreedharan

Elattuvalapil Sreedharan

From: The Economist

"ALL over India, the ultra-modern jostles jarringly beside the medieval—or, these days, underneath it. At Chawri Bazar, in old Delhi, bicycle-rickshaw riders tout for business, while stray cows lounge around in the middle of the roundabout. They are ready to greet those emerging from the 21st century—the deepest station in Delhi's underground-rail network. The passengers havtraveleded on fast, punctual trains, and arrived to a spotlessly clean station. The ticket barriers, using tokens and smart cards, are state-of-the-art, and the three-stage escalator glides smoothly up to the surface.

Indian infrastructure is famously decrepit and is often cited as the single biggest impediment to economic growth. So Delhi is justifiably proud of its metro. Joyriders are common in fact, the fare system has just been tweaked to deter them. Many other Indian infrastructure projects suffer controversy, scandal, delay and extra cost. An eight-year-old effort to modernise the embarrassingly shoddy airports in Delhi and Mumbai, for example, has this month suffered a nationwide strike by airport workers, and legal challenges to the contracts that have, at long last, been placed. The 17km (10 mile) metro in Kolkata (Calcutta) took 22 years to build and revised its budget upward on 14 occasions. Yet, when phase one of Delhi's three-stage metro project was completed in December, with the opening of a third line, bringing the length of the network to 56km, it was on budget and nearly three years ahead of schedule.

That it was built at all has brought kudos to Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, managing director of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). That it was built so quickly, works so well and bears comparison to the best in the world has made him a national hero. Opening the new line, India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, called Mr Sreedharan “a role model for future generations”. The adulation is a mixed blessing for a man who says he wants to retire. Already 73, he has agreed to work for three more years. This will allow him to see phase two —another 53km —well on the way to its deadline, of the summer of 2010, in time for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

Besides the day job, the government has called on his advice for metro projects in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata and Mumbai. He was even dragged into the airport-modernisation mess, as head of a committee appointed to examine the tender process.

Mr Sreedharan has a disarmingly simple explanation for his success: the ownership structure of DMRC. Half the equity is held by the central government, and half by the Delhi authorities. Instead of doubling the amount of bureaucratic meddling, Mr Sreedharan says this almost eliminates it: there is no government ministry to which every file has to be passed. Decision-making is speeded up further by the board's delegation of authority to him. When he took the job in 1997 —seven years after his scheduled retirement— he demanded, and was given, full power to pick his team and a promise of non-interference.

That shows how much respect he already commanded. An engineer and career officer of state-owned Indian Railways, he had spent much of the 1990s running what was then the world's biggest overground-railway building project. This was the Konkan Railway, along India's south-western coast, which was the first such infrastructure contract in India ever awarded on “build, operate and transfer” principles.

Mr Sreedharan's experience taught him two lessons that seem obvious enough, but that many other developers of infrastructure in India have yet to learn. The first is to insist on the global best, rather than to favour Indian firms. The metro's consultants are led by a consortium from Japan (whose government has financed two-thirds of the metro's cost through a soft loan); the signalling and fare-collection systems are French, the rolling-stock Korean.

The second is an emphasis on avoiding the scourge that plagues so many Indian public-sector ventures: corruption. He has tried to purify DMRC's procurement processes by removing almost every element of subjectivity from tender-evaluation. He has also had to show the door to some employees who did not meet his exacting standards.
Pure at heart

Western prejudice might expect such a demanding boss to be some kind of tartar. Mr Sreedharan's own management philosophy sounds so glibly aggressive as to be positively American: “lead from the front, not push from the rear”. But he is not prone to table-thumping harangues. In fact, he seems more like a monk than a manager. He puts his continued health and sharpness down to a “very disciplined life”, of yoga, walks, jogging and controlled eating. His only recreation, he says, is “reading spiritual books”, which gives him “mental composure” and makes him “pure at heart”.

The new line has recently suffered some minor disruption. Earlier this month, part of it had to be shut for 90 minutes when a bird dropped a wet twig on some part of the wiring. There has been occasional trouble with points and the signalling, causing a few services to be cancelled, and some worries about crowd management and the risk of stampedes. Mr Sreedharan explains that the metro could not be “rude” to its customers by closing stations. Such courtesy is a rarity.

Mr Sreedharan denies that the zest for beating deadlines was a factor in any of the new line's “teething troubles”; nor has his reputation suffered. If he is criticised, it is for becoming indispensable, a charge he also denies, claiming there is a “good line of successors”. He is right that the principles he has followed should not need him to enforce them. Mr Sreedharan may be the exception, but his practices could be the rule."

My views:

These teaches us few things:

1. You can Make it happen, If you have guts - you can have it your way - Always.
2. Picking the right people and tools to solve the problem - Get the best out of people.
3. No matter how corrupt the system is, You are the one who makes the System.

From Yeppie, Conneticut, USA