GET ON TO THE FAST TRACK

The new railways minister has quelled the unease among the staff and unions, and is racing to get faster, safer trains on the tracks

- Anilesh S. Mahajan

Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister of Railways

PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI'S CHOICE of Ashwini Vaishnaw as the railways, telecom and IT minister in July last year surprised many. Always a backroom player in the PM's team, Vaishnaw was brought to the fore to streamline reforms in these crucial ministries. The soft-spoken Vaishnaw is a former bureaucrat of the Odisha cadre who quit to pursue a management course at Wharton and later worked with GE and Siemens before launching his own venture in 2014. In the railways, Vaishnaw is using his skills to smoothen ties between warring unions and the railways administration, augment capacities to manufacture the locomotives, coaches and other rolling stock; develop indigenous signal networks and infrastructure along with building the infrastructure to take the railways to newer corners of the country.

At the railways ministry, Vaishnaw has picked up the thread from an earlier failed attempt to bring in private capital to run passenger trains and to corporatize the railways' manufacturing units. There was also the trust deficit among the officers and the unions to deal with. The former was worried about the restrictions on the railway board and the mergers of the railways cadre-which would have disrupted their seniority-and the unions were upset that the railways was moving towards privatization, hurting their job security.