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Elattuvalapil Sreedharan has become a hero in India by doing the
seemingly impossible
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 have travelled 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.
--
"Bart! With $10,000 we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of
useful things... like love." -- Homer J. Simpson
