Making the trains run on time
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5519214
Feb 16th 2006
From The Economist print edition
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.
India
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