Rediff

Ahmedabad, Aug 30: He may be the quintessentially rustic politician whose 15-year-rule in Bihar as chief minister was dubbed by critics as 'jungle raj,' but Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad is set for an image makeover when he dons the role of lecturer at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad next month.

The turnaround in the financial health of Indian Railways, with Prasad in charge, has been a subject of discussion at IIMs and Prasad is already being looked upon as a 'management guru.'

On September 18 this year, Prasad would be delivering a lecture to management students and the faculty at IIM-A, explaining finer points of the Indian Railways 'turnaround,' which earned a profit of Rs 15,000 crore (Rs 150 billion) in 2005-06.

The invitation to deliver a lecture came after IIM Ahmedabad Professor G Raghuram conducted a detailed study on the Railways 'turnaround' and decided to introduce the case study in its curriculum.

In the process, it has become the second-largest PSU profit-earner after the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. Prasad has surprised many by emerging as one of the top performing ministers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Cabinet.

So what Prasad has done to the Indian Railways which his predecessors could not? The answer lies in his own down-to-earth attitude and rustic wisdom.

Prasad puts it in his inimitable style: "My mother always told me not to handle a buffalo by its tail but always catch it by its horns. And I have used that lesson in everything in my life, including the Railways."

When some of the Railway Board members expressed apprehensions in increasing wagon loads, a decision which alone generated Rs 7,200 crore (Rs 72 billion), Prasad said: "Wagon is the bread earning horse of the Railways. Load it adequately. Make it run and don't stable it."

Prasad's other management mantra for the Railways has been: "If you do not milk the cow fully, it falls sick," which he is practicing while running the Railways.

When Prasad took over, the Indian Railways was a loss-making organisation and the Rakesh Mohan Committee said it was destined to hit Rs 61,000 crore (Rs 610 billion) in bankruptcy by 2015 and termed it a 'white elephant.'

Prasad's secret lies in the fact that he did not convert the ministry into a Bihar Bhawan but left the crucial decision to his bureaucrats. He is achieving his targets not by increasing fares or downsizing, but by increasing traffic.

He believes traffic volume will rise significantly as the economy booms, yielding room for further reforms, and is also confident that the Railways will be able to generate revenue to help improve safety, open up container train wagons to private players and air-conditioned 'Garib Rath' with low fares retaining his pro-poor image.

Today it is not only IIM Ahmedabad, which wants to fete Prasad for posting a fund balance of Rs 15,000 crore in 2005-06.

Even the premier international business schools like Harvard and HEC Management School, France, have shown interest in turning Prasad's experiment with the Railways into case studies for aspiring business graduates.