Reflections of Rajaram Bojji

Earlier we used to to have a few dedicated engineers with vision on future and truly struggled with single point concentration passionately think and evolve the strategy for the capital intensive track modernisation and renewals in time so that we do not face spate of accidents stretching the infrastructure to its failure limits. But in spite of such efforts, finally the system had to go through very painful anguished time of a spate of accidents, punishment to a number of good people too, before wisdom prevailed and the infrastructure revived. A period of peace many enjoyed. Now the phase of looking ahead and planning for what next is due to be done in next decade is arising. Traffic densities have almost doubled, and we cannot afford to cripple the system, dropping the traffic for the sake of infrasrtucture renewal and up-gradation. A holistic plan must be drawn out particularly factoring in new realities of social milieu. The usual turf wars, myopic short term goal oriented pass t...

PPP projects Indian Railways> - Those who do not know can be taught if willing to learn. Those who know but unwilling to do, you cannot teach them. Our case is the later. Extreme intelligence, perhaps best in the country, and full awareness represent our railway engineers. Our finance officers too lead and head other BOT organisations successfully in the country. Our Traffic officers successfully played in the market to leverage market forces to get what their organisations which they were heading to get what they want. Our mechanical engineers too played the game of export markets. It is not a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of system. A predominantly operations & maintenance organisation designed to maintain status quo to keep the wheels running day in and day out, where even the Cabinet Minister is under tension, of getting a mid night phone call and truly scared of it, ( as confided to me by a Railway Minister, who told me it is so easy to manage other ministries but in...

Obama as President will be kick starting a massive $800b investment in energy and infrastructure. It is an excellent move to think of 5 to 7% of national economy to be used for priming the economy. Two cardinal principles, of course, I expect the wise architects of this massive conscious effort,to follow. One is employment generation with creation of permanent assets which all the future generations would be grateful for being a wealth generator and not budget guzzler posting losses and proving to be financial burden; secondly this opportunity should be treated as a historic golden chance to cause a paradigm shift in our life style reducing dependence on fossil fuel as much as possible. One such massive and ideal initiative to my mind is to implement alternate gravity energy based transportation technologies of US origin, to eliminate import of 8 to 10 million barrels of oil daily, prevent spewing out of 3.5 billion tons of carbon annually while making handsome profits of 30 to 40% pro...