By M H Ahssan
India's Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav had good reason to feel a sense of pride in a job well done when last week he announced to parliament his final budget, setting his seal on a hard-won reputation for being the most successful holder of the post. Indian Railways, operator of the country's rail network under his command, has posted a historic pre-dividend profit of US$18 billion over the past five years,
Indian Railways (IR) is the world's largest employer, providing 1.6 million jobs - the number of onboard catering staff yelling "chai" relentlessly from 5.30am to 9pm makes it appear as if there are 16 million of them - and Asia's second-largest rail network, carrying 18 million passengers daily. Yet it has, so far, stayed ahead of a near-global recession, and Yadav is not one to let the scale of his success be overlooked.
"The same railways that faced a paucity of funds ... have now surprised the whole world with a historic financial turnaround," Yadav crowed in his final budget speech. "The year 2008 witnessed financial turmoil and a worldwide recession, making it difficult for even Fortune 500 companies to raise debt from the international markets."
Yadav has earned his gloating rights. Five years ago, anyone seriously mentioning profits at Rail Bhavan, the IR headquarters near Parliament House in New Delhi, would have received stares of disbelief, if not prompting an urgent call to the nearest lunatic asylum.
When he took over, the 156-year old Indian Railways was dismissed as a hopeless, loss-making organization, with too little revenue, too many problems and too many employees. State-owned IR was spending 91% of its income just on salaries and maintaining an aging organization.
The Rakesh Mohan Committee report, a study that former Reserve Bank of India deputy governor Rakesh Mohan headed in 2001, termed IR a "white elephant' heading for a $12.6 billion loss-making bankruptcy by 2015.
The dying animal seemed assured of more misery when Yadav took over as railway minister in 2004. The general opinion across the country, which this correspondent gloomily endorsed, was that his appointment was the last nail in the IR coffin, given his controversial track record.
When chief minister of Bihar, that state continued to be one of India's most backward and violent regions. He earned a slew of corruption charges (the most famous being a $500 million cattle-fodder scam), went to jail, then triumphantly rode an elephant while returning home after being released on bail. He resigned in 1997 as chief minister but promptly handed over the job to his barely literate wife, Rabri Devi. The "backwardness" of Bihar under Yadav has been challenged in credible quarters, while he himself has maintained that the state suffered due to the central government being hostile in allocating it funds during his leadership.
Even when not in jail, Yadav was keeping colorful company with convicted murderers, such as his political mate Sibu Soren and brother-in-law Pappu Yadav, both directly elected members of parliament.
But then Yadav unleashed his unique brand of economics and stunned India and the business world. He declared he would earn profits without raising passenger fares - which he actually cut. And the Yadav gloat of success has enriched every IR budget speech since 2004.
Last February, while presenting the railway budget for 2008-09, he again informed parliament of a "historic" cash surplus. "The benchmark of net surplus before dividend of 25,000 crore rupees [US$5.1 billion] makes us better than most of the Fortune 500 companies in the world ..." he said.
By 2006, IR was posting record profits and "Professor" Yadav was lecturing gawking business-school students from Harvard, the Indian Institute of Management and Wharton on how he turned around the hopeless rail company.
Yadav's brand of economics, like his controversial life and his famous wit, is centered around his rural origins. "Indian Railways is like a Jersey cow," he has often said when explaining the rationale behind "Lalu-nomics". "It not milked fully, it would fall ill."
The IR "milk" was freight capacity. Each freight wagon had an under-utilized capacity which corrupt railway officials were privately selling. Yadav explained his management mantra at a media conclave in New Delhi, in April 2007:
- I assured all 16 lakh [1.6 million] gang men, signalmen and others [IR employees] that they will not be retrenched.
- The turnaround in the railways is not one man's effort, I have merely directed it.
- I just said, "We will not let anybody steal. We have to stop it."
- I have personally checked goods trains, weighed the goods on the weighing machine and found huge disparities in load booked and the actual load carried. Several officers have been punished.
- Earlier the loading and unloading used to take seven days, now it has been reduced to five days.
- By taking these few small steps only, we were able to save about 10,000 crore rupees.
- Not just that, we have reduced the expenditure and last year we had a surplus of 13,000 crore rupees and we have paid dividends. This year [2006-07] again we had a surplus of 20,000 crore rupees.
Adding more cream to the "milk" formula, Yadav commissioned India's first dedicated railway freight corridors, two east-west corridors across the country costing $7.5 billion, backed by a $4 billion loan from Japan. On February 9, Yadav commissioned the first 100-kilometer link of the two new tracks, each enabling higher speed goods trains.
"Almost 60% of freight in India is carried by road and I want that to move to the railways, " Yadav said.
The Railway Ministry stint has added a remarkable gloss to the curious legend of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and not just inside the country, with India's foreign offices reporting that he is one of the most sought after Indian politicians overseas.
His charisma seems to cut across bitter international conflicts, borders and even political rivalries. Reports of him being wildly mobbed during his visit to Pakistan in August 2003, as a guest of the South Asian Free Media Association, amazed the Indian public and angered an ignored official delegation of parliamentarians visiting Pakistan at the same time.
Javed Hashmi, then acting president of former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, said Yadav would be a major success if he addressed public rallies in Pakistan. "We don't have any such popular leader in Pakistan," Hashmi said, according to media reports.
Yadav's successful Railway Ministry stint and his political nimbleness demonstrate a shrewd strategic mind lies behind perhaps a deliberately cultivated buffoonish demeanor, complete with a hairstyle generally associated with half-wits featured in Indian movies.
Yadav can be both court jester, who can have parliament rocking with mirth with his wit, and a king-maker - he stood like a rock behind Sonia Gandhi after the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party threatened nationwide agitation over her foreign origin, following her Congress Party leading poll results in 2004.
Yadav urged Gandhi, an Italian citizen until 1985, to accept the people's verdict and become India's prime minister. She chose instead to have Manmohan Singh lead the government. Yadav's 29 Rashtriya Janata Dal MPs became the largest and most reliable partner of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, and the Yadav lore received another lustrous.
"I know some people say I can be funny, but there is always a deeper meaning to what I say," he told Asia Times Online just over four years ago (see India's man for all seasons , September 29, 2004). "I am a socialist at heart and have the interests of the poor in mind. When people see how I manage to work my way out of tough situations, it gives them hope in their own life."
To back his "socialist" core, every IR budget since 2004 includes plans to help the poor. One example - replacing paper cups for servings of tea and coffee with earthen cups to help potters. Not all are successful - the mud-cup ambition did not last long, and paper cups are now back on rails.
Yadav proposed khadi (handspun) bed sheets in the bedding for passengers in air-conditioned coaches; provision of social security for contract workers and porters in India's 6,856 railway stations; running vegetable retail outlets in stations to help farmers get better prices for their produce; and special air-conditioned trains with reduced fares for "poor people" to also enjoy travelling in comfort.
In 2006, he announced using excess railway land - IR is the second-largest land owner in India after the defense forces, owning 43,000 hectares of vacant land - to construct "world class" budget hotels near major railway stations.
Few politicians in the world can claim as colorful a biography as Yadav's, and not many exhibit as simple and grounded an outlook. The 61-year-old cowherd owner from the badlands of Bihar is son of a poor peasant couple and is father of two sons and seven daughters. He became in 1977, at the age of 29, one of India's youngest elected parliamentarians after once wanting to become a police constable; 13 years later he became chief minister of Bihar.
A photograph of Yadav in his early days as chief minister shows him sitting cross-legged on the floor at home, in a vest, and tucking heartily into a large plate of rice and lentils curry, unabashed at the media presence.
Journalist Sankarshan Thakur sounded wonderstruck in his book The Making Of Laloo Yadav - The Unmaking Of Bihar. In a discussion of the book in The Hindu daily in May, 2000, he said: "No chief minister of Bihar has ever ruled from the two-room tenement of a peon [his elder brother] employed by his government. No chief minister of Bihar has ever held cabinet meetings under a tree by the roadside ... has raided liquor shops, constable-like, and canceling their licenses on the spot ... No chief minister has stood in queue with the public at the Patna Medical College Hospital to get his fever-ridden son treated."
Yadav's critics continue to denounce him as an ambitious, political crook who had used caste-baste politics to destroy Bihar. The Yadav website, offering his five office telephone numbers, his e-mail and residence telephone number, is as contradictory and remarkable as the man himself, hailing his achievements, but also referring to him as a "convicted murderer". The online contact form offering "direct" correspondence to Yadav specifies two types of comments that can be sent to him: 1) Questions. 2) Jokes.
The joke collection ridicules both Yadav and his impoverished, violence-ridden Bihar state. One joke claims that he went to Pakistan and solved the long-standing India-Pakistan problem over Kashmir. He simply insisted that if Pakistan wanted Kashmir, then India's unruly Bihar state comes free with it. Pakistan leaders hastily gave up their claims on Kashmir.
The latest contributed joke says Yadav called the Tourist Department to find out the time difference between Patna in Bihar and Las Vegas in the US, and asked, "Could you tell me the time difference between Patna and 'Las Begas'." The man at the other end replies "One second sir ... ". Yadav immediately replies "Thank you" and puts down the phone.
Yadav has openly declared his ambition to become India's prime minister. The prospect of him holding forth his rustic wisdom on how to solve the world's problems to a grinning US President Barack Obama, or a United Nations General Assembly cracking up in mirth, may not be as unthinkable in 2010 as the prospect of Indian Railways, effectively bankrupt in 2004, accumulating an $18 billion profit by 2009.
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