Page 227 - Coffee TB Final 30-3-2023

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of new technologies that would cause a
paradigm shift in railway systems. Passionate
for doing research and implementing systems
for efficient management of railways,
Shri Rajaram is credited with wide scale
computerization of the day to day activities of
Konkan Railway.
The lean manpower structure of Konkan
Railway, designed by Shri B Rajaram, was
appreciated by the World Bank. He also
invented the Anti-Collision Device (ACD) for
prevention of train accidents involving collisions
which is now transformed to TCAS. Holding
national and international patents for ACD, Shri
Rajaram also invented the 'Sky Bus Metro', the
Skycon Port System, Track Identification
System etc - in all 17 patents, were registered
by him.
As the train operations started on Konkan
Railway, the geological challenges that
intermittently disturbed the train operation were
a plenty, especially during the monsoons. While
a number of solutions were tried to arrest the
landslides and pre warn collapse of
cuttings, it was the determination of
Dr K K Gokhale, who took over as Managing
Director of Konkan Railway in 2005 from
Shri Rajaram, which took Konkan Railway
towards a path of greater 'stability' in the years
Dr K K Gokhale
to come. Dr Gokhale initiated wide scale
geo-safety works on the Konkan Railway route,
which includes widening of cuttings, creating
berms, side drains, boulder netting, micro-piling,
shotcreting etc. It is due to these efforts which
were carried out on a large scale continuously
over the last one decade that the Konkan
Railway route has considerably stabilized and
the train operations are smooth even during the
monsoon. This has immensely helped the
passengers, tourists and railways alike.
If geo-safety works were being paid keen
attention to by Dr Gokhale, the Traffic Officer in
him was working overtime to augment freight
traffic on the route and resulted in a steep
upsurge in its revenue. He is credited with
augmentation of revenues from the Roll-on
Roll-off, a service started by Shri B Rajaram, by
first, switching over from use of DBKM wagons
to BRN wagons which could carry more number
and heavier trucks, and second, by intensifying
marketing efforts, so much so that the revenues
from the service increased significantly then to
earn `50 cr annually for the Corporation. The
service became a hit
truck owners and drivers and
was no looking back after
Dr Gokhale also used his exceptionally good
rapport with the zonal railways and the Railway
Board to divert significant freight traffic to the
Konkan Railway route, which for the first time
saw freight revenues of the Corporation increase
to `100 cr from earlier `35 cr.
As the railway route was increasingly settling
down in passenger train operations and the
route was stabilizing, the Corporation was
required to strategize for improving its financial
position. The Corporation had been making
operating surplus from the beginning of the train
operations but yet had a negative Net worth. All
the efforts of marketing and devising of new
business strategies were not getting reflected in
the P&L account at the end of the year due to
the high debt servicing liabilities. Konkan
Railway Corporation had to be salvaged - a
huge challenge which was taken over by
Shri Anurag Mishra who took the reins as the
Managing Director of the Corporation in 2007.
with
there
that.
Anurag Mishra
Not to be daunted by the financial figures staring
at him while taking over as the Managing
Director, Shri Mishra used his years of
experience in railways to improve the balance
sheet and P&L. On the one hand, Shri Mishra
proposed a financial restructuring of the
Corporation to correctly reflect the financial
performance of the Corporation, and on the
other hand took some concrete steps for
augmenting the freight traffic on the route. The
financial restructuring improved the debt-equity
ratio of Konkan Railway from 7:1 in 2007-08 to
0.55:1 in 2008-09, thus taking the Corporation
off the list of loss-making PSUs in India. With
consistent marketing and devising new
strategies, he succeeded in increasing the
number of freight trains on the route. From an
average of four trains per day, freight traffic
increased to nearly 20 trains daily. He
also developed loading and unloading terminals