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Hello Hello everyone, First a Happy New Year to all of you.And our Best wishes to Messrs. K.K.Varma, C.L.Agarwal and J.P.Tripathi, who retired on 31st December 2001 for a happy and healthy retired life. A New Year called for a new format. So my January Newsletter is in a totally new format, with a new masthead and slogan. Every Newsletter made so far is a website with plenty of links and a lot of effort going in. The main purpose of the whole exercise is to bring the Finance and accounts family closer. That can be achieved only if all of us communicate with each other. Let us hope more and more officers contribute to the preparation of the Newsletter so that it becomes a 'finance family' magazine. Last week, I was in the lift in our building which has 18 floors. Six of us got in at the groundfloor and the buttons pressed were 4,6,8,10,12 and 14. That set me thinking. If the capacity is 6, what is the probability of all going to a) even/odd numbered floors b) consecutive floors c) same floor. Will some mathematician in the accounts family give me the answers?I tried and failed , having forgotten probability theory. Since the Newsletter has been revamped, the quiz has also been revamped. It is still in Javascript, but in a totally new format. Please attempt it. Parthasarathy |
You had suggested some bold reforms to restructure the railways. What happened to that? The report was submitted two months ago to the railway minister. The minister had then appointed some railway officials to look into the report in detail and I think they are supposed to recommend to him a course of action. So, it is not shelved. I presume they are working on it. In the meantime, there have been two meetings with the officers and railway unions to get their reactions to the report. One meeting was in Delhi, the other was in Vadodara. The central minister and the minister of state were at the meetings along with the Railway Board, senior officers, trade union representatives and some retired chairmen and members of the Railway Board. Can you just encapsulate your report on the railway restructuring? The basic point of the report is to note that the Railways are in a serious fiscal situation. For the first time in seventeen years, last year the Railways were not able to pay the usual dividend that they pay to the government. Nor could they pay it this year. That makes it two years running. Our analysis was that if the Indian Railways continue this way, they would not be able to pay any dividend in the near future. The basic issue is that the Railways are in a serious fiscal condition and have to take action to increase, both, their freight and passenger revenues. To do that, they have to carry out very significant organisational reforms to make the Railways more customer-oriented than they are currently. To increase the distance between commercial decision-making and the Railways, we have recommended that the Railways be corporatised. There ought to be a Railway Regulatory Authority that decides on the tariffs while the government will make the policies. We have said very clearly that different functions should be separated. The Railways will run as a commercial entity. The government wants that the Railways should pay for it. We have also suggested major structural reforms. It is not easy for large organisations like the Railways to be corporatised. Our report suggests that it will take anything between three to five years, if one begins soon. In the first instance, you need to change the accounting procedures from the current departmental accounting to corporate accounting. The reason for that is that if you want commercial operations, then you need the kind of information that corporate accounting yields. This way you can visualise which operations need changing. You also need to shift to a corporate kind of framework in terms of long-term planning. |