In July last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi selected Ashwini Vaishnav as the Minister of Railways, Telecom and IT. Vaishnav, who has always been a backroom player in the PM’s team, was brought to the fore to streamline reforms in these important ministries. Soft-spoken Vaishnav is a former Odisha cadre bureaucrat who dropped out to pursue a management course at Wharton and later worked with GE and Siemens before starting his own venture in 2014. In the Railways, Vaishnavs are using their skills to facilitate relationships between increased capacity for warring unions and railway administrations, manufacturing locomotives, coaches and other rolling stock; Developing indigenous signal network and infrastructure along with building infrastructure to take railways to newer corners of the country.
In the Ministry of Railways, Vaishnav has picked up the thread from an earlier failed attempt to bring in private capital to run passenger trains and to incorporate manufacturing units of the Railways. There was also a lack of trust between officials and unions to deal with it. The former were concerned about restrictions on the Railway Board and merger of railway cadres – which would have hampered their seniority – and unions were upset that the railways was moving towards privatization, affecting their job security.
Vaishnav was the first to put an end to the privatization rumours. None of his predecessors managed to bring regulators into the railways—the biggest deterrent to private investment, especially in operations. Vaishnavs are also not in a position to pursue this reform immediately. What they did was to expedite the work on Kavach, an indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system. He scrapped plans to import the system from European companies. In the last six months, Kavach has been rolled out on New Delhi-Howrah and New Delhi-Mumbai sections and is targeted to be completed by March 2024. Third, he won the confidence of the unions that private capital would come. In capacity building, no more units will be incorporated. In addition, his understanding of technology and the skills he acquired during his corporate jobs worked when he designed a new PPP model, where private capital is sought to upgrade existing facilities to manufacture rolling stock. , wherein the investors are allowed to take the existing railway employees on deputation. in their operation in these units.
The idea is to enhance their skill set for future ready technologies. This model has also cut down on capital expenditure requirements from corporates. The Railways has started the process of selecting partners to manufacture 800 high-end electric 12,000 hp locomotives and modern LHB (Linke Hoffmann Busch) coaches for freight transportation at its existing factories.
cover story , challenges ahead
The biggest test for Vaishnav would be realizing 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 tests, commercial production will begin in the next 45 days. Their mid-term target is to run these trains on 75 routes by Independence Day next year.
The train set—self-propelled locomotives combined with coaches to form an integrated set—will ensure a more comfortable ride than premium trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi. The Railways expects to get 4-5 trains every month till Diwali, with some running on the routes connecting Ahmedabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Bhopal, Guwahati, Kolkata, Tirupati, Pune, Chennai etc. Currently, Vande Bharat trains are running on Delhi-Katra and Delhi-Lucknow routes.