Jerry Rao , Audit and Konkan Railway

Jerry Rao wrote very nicely about Audit and am glad to know about his father Shri Ranga.

"

Our tamper-resistant institutions.......Jaithirth Rao
jerry.rao@expressindia.com


Many of our independent institutions have been buffeted by crises, and survived. If only we let them"

Very positive and re-assuring article of faith for us.

The respect due to these constitutional institutions like CAG, for enforcing checks and balances in the system, is of late not given by the executives. More often than not they find ways of circumventing them and also find soft ways to seduce them too to turn a blind eye selectively to the executives' actions of commission and omission.

When I was designing and implementing my own dream Railway Applications Package, in Konkan Railway, which has as its motto that every single data entry shall be done only once , but influences various algorithms where the data is required, that is train operation, real time control charts, instructions to station masters regarding train running, drivers's over time or crew change, earnings, track and asset maintenance and ultimately even drawing up the balance sheet of the company.

All the departments' data bases are seamlessly integrated and the system has built in intelligence to think and work out and communicate consequent actions and decisions to the concerned persons, in real time, when one single entry is made some where in one of the 550 odd locations in the 700 km route and offices.

Now the decision process has audit trail available and I wanted the CAG representative sitting in our office, to have the same level of access permission as the highest ranking executive, making it totally transparent for them to read and down load for making their observations. The same thousand and odd( not literally but really) rules and regulations from the Railway Codes only formed the basis of the work flow algorithms.

Surprisingly my executives initially were very reluctant and resisted. In fact it is surprising to see the antipathy towards even from lowest rung of the executives towards the audit officers. Generally they are treated as an obstruction and a brake on their executive freedom of action.

But I held different view even from my days of joining the service at the lowest executive level.

When you want to do rightly, I said , where is the conflict of interest?

Those who resist, have to be considered to be having a private agenda and I will have to treat them with some suspicion, I said.

Then the resistance evaporated. So Audit was all the privileges to log in surf any department , their decision process and expenditure with all accounts too being visible, on the Konkan Railway

It helps all of us. if I could do in a small microcosm like my tiny railway system of 700 km route, the software developed being capable of handling any railway network of any size, ( it is only the server size we have to design), why we cannot replicate in other places?

Surprisingly, it is the higher rung executives who resist such wide area networked open database and administration because of perceived loss of their control on information.

On more than one occasion, I had conversations personally with Jerry Rao. A scintillating brain he has.