Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s choice of Ashwini Vaishnaw as the railways, telecom and IT minister in July last year surprised many. Always a backroom player in the PM’s team, Vaishnaw was brought to the fore to streamline reforms in these crucial ministries. The soft-spoken Vaishnaw is a former bureaucrat of the Odisha cadre who quit to pursue a management course at Wharton and later worked with GE and Siemens before launching his own venture in 2014. In the railways, Vaishnaw is using his skills to smoothen ties between warring unions and the railways administration, augment capacities to manufacture the locomotives, coaches and other rolling stock; develop indigenous signal networks and infrastructure along with building the infrastructure to take the railways to newer corners of the country.
At the railways ministry, Vaishnaw has picked up the thread from an earlier failed attempt to bring in private capital to run passenger trains and to corporatise the railways’ manufacturing units. There was also the trust deficit among the officers and the unions to deal with. The former was worried about the restrictions on the railway board and the mergers of the railways cadre—which would have disrupted their seniority—and the unions were upset that the railways was moving towards privatisation, hurting their job security.
The first thing Vaishnaw did was to put a lid on the privatisation rumours. None of his predecessors managed to bring in regulators in the railways—the single biggest deterrent to private investment, especially in operations. Vaishnaw, too, is not in a position to push through this reform immediately. What he did do is accelerate the work on the indigenously developed automatic train protection (ATP) system, Kavach. He scrapped the plans to import the system from European companies. In the past six months, Kavach has been rolled out on the New Delhi-Howrah and New Delhi-Mumbai sections and is targeted for completion by March 2024. Thirdly, he won the confidence of the unions by committing that private capital will come in only into capacity-building, and the units will not be corporatised. Further, his understanding of technology and the skills picked up during his corporate jobs came in handy while designing a new PPP model, where private capital is sought to upgrade the existing facilities to manufacture rolling stocks, with investors allowed to take existing railway staff on deputation in their operations at these units.
The idea is to enhance their skill sets for future-ready technologies. This model has also cut down the capital expenditure requirements from the corporates. The railways has already started the process to select the partners for manufacturing 800 high-end electric 12,000 HP locomotives for freight carriage and modern LHB (Linke Hoffmann Busch) coaches at their existing factories.
COVER STORY | The challenges ahead
The biggest test for Vaishnaw will be realising the dream of running 400 indigenously designed and developed semi-high speed Vande Bharat trains on existing tracks in the next three years. He says the prototypes will be ready by August and, based on their trials, commercial production will start in the next 45 days. His mid-term goal is to run these trains on 75 routes by Independence Day next year.
The train sets—self-propelled locomotives linked together with the coaches to form a unified set—will ensure a more comfortable ride than premium trains like the Rajdhani and Shatabdi. By Diwali, the railways is expected to get 4-5 trains every month, to run on some routes connecting Ahmedabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Bhopal, Guwahati, Kolkata, Tirupati, Pune, Chennai etc. Currently, Vande Bharat trains are running on the Delhi-Katra and Delhi-Lucknow routes.