After lecturing management students from India and the USA, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad is now all set to share the lessons learnt from the railway turnaround story with the top honchos of leading information technology companies.
The minister, credited for the Indian railway success story, will address the crème-de-la-crème of the Indian IT industry at a function organised by the National Association for Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), here on Monday. The Minister will also give away the NASSCOM IT users award.
Mr Prasad will receive a special award for pioneering the use of technology in the Railways, says a Nasscom official.
Indian Railways is expected to procure IT hardware and software worth Rs 10,000 crore in the next three to four years to continue with its modernisation drive.
Some of the major IT initiatives of the Railways are: giving hand-held computers to ticket examiners, building cyber cafes at stations, digitising the signalling system, developing a commercial portal integrating 50 odd different existing websites, linking all online applications with the computerised reservation system and tracking the passenger and freight trains. The railways has invited Indian companies to work in a public-private partnership mode.
Within years of the Rakesh Mohan Committee dismissing the Railways as a bankrupt organisation, Mr Prasad scripted the turnaround story in which the railways has earned a cash surplus of Rs 20,000 crore before dividend in 2006-07.
Popular tale
The success story has become so popular that a group of students from the University of Texas and University of Virginia came to New Delhi earlier this year to have a first-hand interaction with the man behind the success.
Mr Prasad had also received invitations from Harvard and Stanford University as well as from the World Bank.
He could not accept any of these offers because of his poll responsibilities for the Uttar Pradesh assembly election.