Zoo Station

Those of us who grew up in India are programmed to be dismissive of the Indian bureacracy. While this is generally justifiable, especially at the lower echelons, it does not do justice to men of the calibre of E.Sreedharan, the chairman of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. The last issue of the Economist carried a profile relating how Sreedharan got to become one of the most widely admired people in India by making the Delhi Metro one of the better metro systems in the world.

Mr Sreedharan has a disarmingly simple explanation for his success: the ownership structure of DMRC. Half the equity is held by the central government, and half by the Delhi authorities. Instead of doubling the amount of bureaucratic meddling, Mr Sreedharan says this almost eliminates it: there is no government ministry to which every file has to be passed. Decision-making is speeded up further by the board's delegation of authority to him. When he took the job in 1997—seven years after his scheduled retirement—he demanded, and was given, full power to pick his team and a promise of non-interference.

That shows how much respect he already commanded. An engineer and career officer of state-owned Indian Railways, he had spent much of the 1990s running what was then the world's biggest overground-railway building project. This was the Konkan Railway, along India's south-western coast, which was the first such infrastructure contract in India ever awarded on “build, operate and transfer” principles.

Mr Sreedharan's experience taught him two lessons that seem obvious enough, but that many other developers of infrastructure in India have yet to learn. The first is to insist on the global best, rather than to favour Indian firms. The metro's consultants are led by a consortium from Japan (whose government has financed two-thirds of the metro's cost through a soft loan); the signalling and fare-collection systems are French, the rolling-stock Korean. The second is an emphasis on avoiding the scourge that plagues so many Indian public-sector ventures: corruption. He has tried to purify DMRC's procurement processes by removing almost every element of subjectivity from tender-evaluation. He has also had to show the door to some employees who did not meet his exacting standards.

I know for a fact that there are several people like Sreedharan within the Indian bureaucratic system. The question is how to bring them out of the woodwork, where their skills are utterly under-employed, to head projects where they can make a real difference. We have seen this in the past with the efforts of people like Sam Pitroda in the telecom sector, so there is no real reason these episodes have to be so far so and so few in between, is there?